(Traduce en español/translate to Spanish) By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, Threads @bfchugginalong, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) October 31, 2024; UPDATED November 5: I noted below that my Electoral College predictions are rough, but am restating today on Election Day that I believe the most likely outcome will be my “strong” for Harris prediction (3rd map); Updated November 4 to cover Florida Senate race; *UPDATED November 3rd: added discussion of Iowa’s move into the swing state category, courtesy of the peerless Ann Selzer, and Electoral College maps have been updates in turn; also slight update to voter registration modeled partisanship; Update November 1st: fixed section on Florida and Virginia with missing text and fixed NC registration graphic that was GA; see related article on this election from September 6, 2024, and one on the 2022 midterms from November 7, 2022; because of YOU, Real Context News is approaching two million all-time content views, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

SILVER SPRING—We’re at the point in this election where we should able to start making predictions, because it is hard to believe anything dramatically different will emerge in polling in the next week, and I am here making mine (which I may or may not update).  But first, some housekeeping.

Methodology

In general, a good rule of thumb is to go by weighted polling averages.  One of the weaknesses of Real Clear Politics’s averages are that they basically put any poll in there without weighting for quality in an election cycle in which there have been a lot of low-quality polls using less-accurate sampling methods as well as a high number of biased partisan polls, a fair amount of both driving the discussion and most of the latter by far are from Republican-favoring sponsors (I have not been able to find an explanation of its methodology on the RCP site).  But FiveThirtyEight the past several presidential election cycles has had more accurate polling averages than especially RCP but other sites like The New York Times, whose polls this cycle, conducted with Sienna College, seem to be oversampling Republican-leaning voters significantly (meaning disproportionately including Republican representation in their estimation of who will turn out and vote).  Thus, my main source of information for polling is always FiveThirtyEight’s polling averages.  I will be using their national and state polling averages here.

In addition, I will be also combining polling data with modeled partisan voter registration modeled partisanship from Tom Bonier’s excellent outfit TargetSmart, the data presented from which I used during the 2022 midterms to predict, accurately, when very few others would, that there would be no “red wave” and that polls were undercounting Democratic support in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s infamous Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, women especially coming out strongly to support Democrats for a historic overperformance for a party in power of the same party as a sitting president in his first term.  And newly registered voters are not only more likely to vote than previously registered voters in a soon-to-happen election, but they are indicative also that others in the groups they represent are also more likely to vote.  While in many cases, the absolute numbers of voters registering are less than in 2020, the portions overall of all new registrants shifting significantly net towards Democrats is a very telling dataset considering 1-how insanely close the results of the key swing states were in 2020 and 2-how close in polling it is today it is in key states where there is a disproportionate portion of new voters modeled as likely to vote for Democrats.

In a moment of statistical ties in swing state polling, that that is as good a sign as any that Democrats will win in states statically tied—that is, within the margin-of-error range of what usually 95% of outcomes would be expected to fall under—or very close.  For this reason, in these close races in which the polls are a statistical tie, I am going to let modeled partisanship based on voter registration data be one of the decisive factors in how I make my predictions.  So for me, the more of a net shift towards Democrats in modeled partisanship share of new registrations, the more likely Democrats are likely to outperform their polls, i.e., the less polling will capture this shift.  My “net shift” is calculated by the getting difference between the point shifts for each side, so if GOP went down 3 points and Democrats up 2, that’s a 5-point shift in favor of Democrats in my scoring system.

I will also very much be relying on my own analysis from my last article—based on voter registration and early voting data as presented by Bonier’s outfit and its (and my) excellent track record from 2022—that very confidently concluded state and national polls across the board are generally off, missing those hugely disproportionate swings compared to 2020 in the share of new voter registrations towards Democratic leaning populations and the effect of new abortion and reproductive rights restrictions in many states across the country since the fall of Roe.  As I noted in my last piece and will reinforce here, when races are extremely close, polling with its inherent errors is not a sufficient tool in trying to analyze who will win and who will lose and analysis will have to take into account other factors, as I have before and will here.

Finally, based mainly on my discussions of the individual states and national polling data along with early voting data, I will make a range of Electoral College map predictions as well as a win probability prediction for both Kamala Harris-Tim Walz and Donald Trump-JD Vance (rough on the odds part).

Caveats, source, and presentation notes:

• The TargetSmart Voter Registration Dashboard shows you when each state last reported its registrants and they are not uniform.  The dashboard lets you adjust to match the time when voter registration data was last reported to data from the same time in the previous presidential election in 2020 and the 2022 midterms as a frame of reference.  Obviously, when not looking at individual states, there is no way to get a fully accurate national or all-swing-state picture with combined states with different dates, but most are within a few weeks of each other so the combined outputs can give a quite rough but still quite useful general sense of what’s going on.  You can play around yourself with different data and different variables—race, age, gender, rural, urban, etc.—and I recommend that you do, but I found modeled partisanship to be most useful.
• All polling averages are what FiveThirtyEight has posted as of 8:15 PM on October 30; if numbers don’t quite add up (0.1 off or tied) in terms of the FiveThirtyEight numbers given, it might be because they rounded using more precise data from crosstabs.
• In my presentation here and in general, polling data/shifts are generally rounded to nearest tenth of a percent/point.
• Herein, polling figure is given as a percent.  I will use “points” to describe a number-level shift, and a percent increase would be the increase by a factor, as in a 2.5-point increase from 5% to 7.5% would be a 50% increase, by a factor of 1.5 times the original.
• FiveThirtyEight uses likely voter iterations of a poll in its weighted averages whenever possible.
• Numbers given for Puerto Ricans in each state are from 2023 from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, except Alaska’s are from 2022.
• All polling chart images from FiveThirtyEight and all registration chart images from TargetSmart
• Coming up with overall predictions is more an art, not a science, but one using scientific tools that are inherently flawed and yet still pretty-damn good in the aggregate.

On Polling

In my previous article, I really went into the weeds on some polling issues and why I was so confident in 2022 and why I am even more confident now in the polls undercounting Democratic support in 2024 (and remember, I was one of the only people in 2022 making such a prediction, so take that for what it’s worth).  But on average, according to FiveThirtyEight, overall from 2000 to 2020, presidential general election polls three weeks out from Election Day—both state and national—have been off by 4.3% since 2000.  Harry Enten noted in a FiveThirtyEight 2016 classic that the a 2-point error was the average presidential national polling error a week before the election from 1968-2012, which would fall in most cases within the margin of error of each poll, or a  “standard polling error,” noting that Trump was just such a standard polling error away from winning.  Even with 2022 being far more accurate a year for polling that usual, the polls in close House races in the midterm year incorrectly favored Republicans (also known as GOP, for Grand Old Party) in most of those races, with Democrats winning in most of them in part because of women being fired up about their rights being taken away by the Supreme Court and their state legislatures.  Things have only gotten worse for women since then, with new restrictive laws literally killing women across the country.  So do not make the mistake in thinking that this issue has faded for women.

And with amazing new registration proportions for Democratic-leaners compared to Republican-leaners, it is key to note that pollsters often do not incorporate newly registered voters into their models and sampling or find it hard to do so accurately.  So I am very confident that polls are undercounting the level of Democratic vote share for the 2024 election and you can explore my detailed discussion here.  As a result of this gap, I am putting significant weight behind new voter registration share by likely-party vote.  Therefore, you can add a few points to most polls in favor of Harris in most cases, both in state polls and nationally, and you will likely get a better sense of where things stand.

THE NUMBERS AND PREDICTIONS

The Seven States that Most Mainstream Press Agrees Are the “Swing States” (UPDATED: November 3) *AND Iowa

Ratings system: Arrange by worst for Harris to Best for Harris and reflecting likelihood/probability of winning, not necessarily margin of victory: Edge Trump, Edge Harris, Advantage Harris, Strong Harris

All of these states are currently within the aforementioned margin of error and are considered statistically tied, essentially jump balls. *UDPATE November 3: Voter registration modeled partisanship has slightly increased for Democrats and slightly decreased for Republicans in Pennsylvania, North Caroline, and Georgia with new batches of voter registration data released by those states since October 31 and new modeling on that data being released by TargetSmart; therefore, the gaps highlighted below for those three states are now slightly higher in favor of Democrats than the figures given here, having just increased in the final days of the campaign, another data point in favor of a momentum swing for Harris.

*UPDATE: NOVEMBER 3: IOWA!!!—6 Electoral Votes

Polling: Average not given. I am surprised to be including Iowa here, but I have no choice. I know that I always caution not to put too much stock in any one poll, but I must make somewhat of an exception here (and to be fair, it’s not just one poll). To get to the point, Iowa pollster Ann Selzer is one of the best pollsters in politics, perhaps the best. He long track record speaks for itself and her approach is meticulous. She released polls in partnership with The Des Moines Register back in February and June that had Biden losing by 15 and 18 points to Trump, respectively. Then in September, that lead in a another Selzer poll had shrunken to just 4 points against Harris. And now, just before the election, Selzer has Harris overtaking Trump by 3 points, 47%-44%! Yes, it is within her margin of error, but Selzer’s poll if the only poll to show anything like this—all others have Trump up (nearly all significantly) and another poll just released has him up 9 points—but no other pollster conducting these polls is like Ann or has her record. The profound thing about this poll is, that if it is accurate, it surely captures something beyond Iowa, something regional, maybe even national, that the vast majority of polls have simply missed. It is at the heart of what I have gotten into in this article before this update, that the modeled partisanship from voter registration data tells a story that is incompatible with that narrative and narratives we have from the polls, and suggests movements and shifts in the electorate among significant parts of the population, especially with new voters likely to be missed or underrepresented especially if they are registering in historic and abnormal ways. And Nate Silver and The New York Times‘ Nate Cohn both just pointed out how bad pollsters this cycle have been with “herding,” or modifying their results to not stand out too much and not take heat for being “wrong” or an outlier. Now, none of this means that Selzer must be right, and the others wrong. And I am not going to move Iowa into Harris’s column based on just Selzer’s latest poll and the shifts from her previous poll. But Ann is credible in and of herself, I have enough respect for and deference to her, and her previous three polls were well within the realm of being favorable or very favorable to Trump, that I am going to move Iowa into battleground swing-state status, but as all the other polls have Trump winning, even though I think they are not up to the standards of Selzer, I am rating Iowa as slightly favoring Trump. Without Selzer, I wouldn’t even be discussing Iowa, but now we all should be: Harris has a real chance if Selzer’s poll is accurate, and her polls usually are. If I am right, Selzer is capturing what I am onto, what the modeled voter registration partisanship is pointing towards, and what will explain a large Harris win if that is what unfolds over the next few days. If Selzer’s poll is accurate, it might just be the most important poll in the history of American politics. As of now, it is certainly one of the most discussed and highlighted of in American history, I have certainly never before seen a reaction to a single poll as massive as the political world’s reaction to this poll.

Also, there are also over 9.000 Puerto Ricans in Iowa (see the Pennsylvania discussion below) while the Uncommitted movement received over 600 votes, or 4.5% of the vote (see the Michigan discussion below); Trump won Iowa in 2020 by over 138,000 votes, or 8.2%.

IOWA RATING: Edge Trump (but don’t be surprised if Harris wins!)

New registration modeled party share: Last updated October 20

Vs. same weeks before election in 2020: Democrats +3.1 points, GOP +0.3 points, net shift +2.8 points for Democrats

While a slight shift, given Selzer’s poll and Iowa’s small population, this could end up making a big difference…

Pennsylvania—19 Electoral Votes

Polling average: Trump 47.9%, Harris 47.5%, Trump +0.4 points

Polling is razor close, and in most scenarios I have whoever wins Pennsylvania winning it all, finding it hard to imagine a scenario in which that is not the case (though not impossible).  While the polling is within the margin of error, I think in nearly all these states, the polls are undercounting democratic support.  Having said that, even if it is, say, 3% off (putting her at +2.7), that is still a very close race polling-wise and within the margin of error.  So, as stated, I am going to look at new registrants.

New registration modeled party share: Last updated October 20

Vs. same weeks before election in 2020: Democrats +7.6 points, GOP -3.1 points, net shift 10.7 points for Democrats

As far as Pennsylvania’s voter registration data, of the three Rust Belt battleground states, the data is most promising here for Harris and by far.  Also factor in that popular Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro is a rockstar in the state and is campaigning heavily for Harris there.  Additionally, factor in that at Trump’s final rally at Madison Square Garden, a speaker prominently trashed Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean” (all Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, in case you did not know that) and that there are over 472,000 Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania, the most of any swing state (in each swing state we will now be discussing the Puerto Rican x-factor!  Thanks, Tony Hinchcliffe), which stands up well against the over 61,000 write-ins for 5.6% of the vote in the Democratic primary, most representing Uncommitted protesting Israel’s war in Gaza (see the discussion on Michigan below).  Remember that Trump lost in Pennsylvania by less than 82,000 votes in 2020, and I think the net picture of these factors in Pennsylvania means the state is a pretty good bet for Harris. 

PENNSYLVANIA RATING: Strong Harris

Also, Democratic incumbent Senator Bob Casey is polling better than Harris against Republican challenger Dave McCormick, so I see a strong chance for Casey’s victory.

Michigan—15 Electoral Votes

Polling average: Harris 48%, Trump 47%, Harris +1 point

Even though Harris is polling better here than anywhere else not only in the Rust Belt but also better than any other swing state, this is deceptive.  And yes, while Michigan has the third-highest African-American population proportionately of any swing state and fifteenth-highest in the nation, there are other factors that are not good for Harris here in Michigan…

New registration modeled party share: Last updated October 20

Vs. same weeks before election in 2020: Republicans +8.4 points, Democrats -2.1 points: net shift 10.5 points for GOP

Of the seven states dubbed by most as swing states, this is one of only two that saw a shift in favor of Republicans (and by far the larger shift) and this bodes quite ill for Democrats in Michigan as it is a significant shift that could very well overcome the fact that Harris’s polling average here is her best in the Rust Belt, given that that it is not her best by much. One x-factor?  In such a close state, there are almost 54,000 Puerto Ricans in Michigan.  And all this in a state a state Trump lost by less than 155,000 votes in 2020.  Also, it should be noted Michigan has a something of a screwy recent history of throwing pollsters curve balls, for what that’s worth.

But the real elephant in the room for Democrats and Michigan are the deaths of many Arabs in the fighting with Israel: the horrific mass violence, mass displacement, and mass destruction in Palestine’s Gaza in the escalation of the conflict between Hamas and Israel that erupted with Hama’s massive terrorist attack against Israel on October 7, 2023, as well as increasing violence in Lebanon and Palestine’s illegally-occupied-by-Israel-since-1967 West Bank, are all deeply affecting Michigan’s substantial Arab-American community, which consists of over 208,000 people and in Michigan represents the highest share for an Arab population of the total population in any state.  As a result these events and the Biden-Harris Administration’s support for Israel, many of them are holding Biden and Harris responsible for, in their view, not stopping and even enabling all of this and are now reluctant or refusing to support her.  In fact, out of all the swing states, Michigan had the most proportionately and absolutely Uncommitted National Movement votes protesting the war in Gaza in the Democratic Primary this year: over 101,000 voters for some 13.2% of the presidential primary vote.  The movement includes many non-Arabs and non-Muslims and many young people.

But to be clear, not all these people—maybe even not most—would necessarily not support Harris over Trump, as the movement was meant to send a signal and was not officially a firm anti-Biden or anti-Harris vote, hence the term “uncommitted” (and I am sure plenty of Arabs in Michigan will still vote for her, just less so than if what was happening in the Middle East was not happening), while some of the Puerto Rican population are minors and all the Uncommitteds were able to vote.  Thus, do no look at the Puerto Ricans and Uncommitted one-to-one as easily canceling each other out, but I am just giving all this data an context for.. context (remember the name of my site, cherished readers).

One other thing: despite endorsing Trump, former candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is still on Michigan’s ballot as a separate candidate, having lost multiple legal challenges to remove his name, including just recently at the U.S. Supreme Court.  Along with Wisconsin, Michigan is one of only two swing states in which he remains on the ballot.

This state really is up for grabs, but with the polls so close and statistically tied, and such a meaningful shift towards Republicans in the share of overall new registration vs 2020 and problems Democrats are having with Arab-Americans, I would have to say I see Trump as slightly more likely to win, but it could be extremely close either way.

MICHIGAN RATING: Edge Trump

On a positive note for Democrats, their Senate candidate Elissa Slotkin is polling significantly better than Harris and I give her and an advantage against her Republican opponent Mike Rodgers.

Wisconsin—10 Electoral Votes

Polling average: Harris 48.0%, Trump 47.6%, Harris +0.4 points

Wisconsin had been where Harris was polling the best in the Rust Belt for some time, but things have narrowed for whatever reasons in recent weeks.  Even though the polling now is slightly better in Michigan, there are not the complications in that state has that I just discussed here in Wisconsin.

New registration modeled party share: Last updated October 21

Vs. same weeks before election: Democrats -4.1 points, GOP -6 points, net shift 2.1 points for Democrats

Still, with a statistical tie in effect with such a slight lead, modeled voter registration partisanship does not give her a huge boost: of the five swing states where there has been a shift towards Democrats, Wisconsin has the weakest such shift by far.  The potential Puerto Rican factor involves nearly 65,000 Puerto Ricans.  Conversely, for what it’s worth, the Uncommitted vote in the Democratic primary was over 48,000 votes for 8.3% of the vote (Trump lost by less than 21,000 votes).  Also, like Michigan and as mentioned, Wisconsin is one of only two swing states where RFK Jr. is still on the ballot, most recently being denied removal from both by the U.S. Supreme Court.  Based on this available data and my conclusion that polls are undercounting Democratic support, I’d say Harris is more likely than not to win here in Wisconsin and not just barely, though it will still likely be close.

WISCONSIN RATING: Advantage Harris

Incumbent Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin is in a tight race against Republican Eric Hovde, but has consistently polled ahead of him.  Along with Harris, I see her as having an advantage.

Georgia—16 Electoral Votes

Polling average: Trump 48.7%, Harris 47.0%, Trump +1.8 points

Georgia is Trump’s second-best poll-showing among swing states, but I would argue this is deceptive.  It is still well within the margin of error and there are certainly some other factors that are very much not in his favor when it comes to this state…

New registration modeled party share: Last updated October 8

Vs. same weeks before election in 2020: Democrats +7.1 points, Republicans -12.2 points, net shift +19.3 points for Democrats

Folks, this is a massive shift towards Democrats and I do not think polling has captured this.  And part of that is black women being incredibly enthused for Kamala Harris in a state that has the highest African-American share of the overall population of any swing state and the third-highest of any state.  And let’s not forget Trump’s longstanding feuds with Republican Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (listen to my interview with him six days before Trump’s Capitol Insurrection) acting against Trump’s longstanding election overturning/denial efforts.  There are also over 120,000 Puerto Ricans in Georgia (Trump infamously lost by less than 12,000 votes) and Uncommitted was not on the ballot here in the Democratic primary.  Finally, do not underestimate the political machine that former Democratic gubernatorial candidate and Georgia House of Representatives Minority leader Stacey Abrams has helped put in place.  Especially with the voter registration data, I am very confident Harris wins Georgia.

GEORGIA RATING: Strong Harris

North Carolina—16 Electoral Votes

Polling average: Trump 48.3,% Harris 47.3%, Trump +1.1 point

Once again, there is a statistical tie here.  But with a Republican Governor candidate who is possibly the worst gubernatorial candidate in modern American history—an African-American extremist who called himself a “black NAZI!” on a porn website’s forum, among other disgracefully pathetic and offensive things in his history—likely dragging Trump down among undecideds, independents, and some Republicans, the closeness in the poll might be deceptive.  But then there is the voter registration stuff…

New registration modeled party share: Last updated October 11

Vs. same weeks before election in 2020: Democrats +5.4 points, GOP -5.5 points, net shift +10.9 points for Democrats

North Carolina also has the second-highest portion of African-American voters of any swing state and the eight-most in America, something that is definitely quite favorable for Harris.  Also, there are over 130,000 Puerto Ricans in North Carolina; on the other side, North Carolina had second-highest absolute and proportionate turnout for Uncommitted during the Democratic primary among swing states: almost 89,000 voters for 12.7% of the vote (Trump won the state in 2020 by less than 75,000 votes).  On balance with all of this, and given especially the big shift in modeled partisanship and the state’s large black population, I think Harris has a clear advantage in this state, though not a strong one as Trump won by close to 75,000 votes in 2020, so that margin won’t be easy to overcome.

NORTH CAROLINA RATING: Advantage Harris* (I am putting an asterisk here because an x-factor is the intersection of the damage from Hurricane Helene that may yet lead to many people having difficulties in voting, the rampant and wildly dangerous disinformation spewed by Trump and Russia and many others about FEMA and overall government relief efforts in the state leading to actual armed threats against FEMA staff, and the actual major efforts going on there by the Biden-Harris Administration to help people there; I do not know how and/or if these dynamics will play out and affect the election here so leave some room for North Carolina to surprise).

Nevada—6 Electoral Votes

Polling average: Harris 47.5%, Trump +47.4%, Harris +0.1 points

Polls here in Nevada are really tight, though they have generally been better for Harris here than its southwestern counterpart, Arizona.  As in most other cases, though, I still think polls are undercounting Democratic support.  So what does voter registration data tell us?

New registration modeled party share: Last updated October 25

Vs. same weeks before election in 2020: Democrats -7.1 points, GOP -6.2 points, net shift +1.1 points for GOP

This is the only other swing state besides Michigan that shifted towards the GOP, though only slightly so, and in a state with a smaller population like Nevada, that could amount to a big deal.  There are also approaching 35,000 Puerto Ricans in Nevada, while a “None of these candidates” inspired by Uncommitted received less than 7,500 votes at 5.5% of the Democratic primary vote (Trump only lost this state by in 2020 by less than 24,000 votes).  This has the potential to be the closest state, but with Harris actually leading in the polls if only by the most minute amount, and with only the barest shift so far towards the GOP in registration, this comes down to a gut feeling if I am not going to award a tie, and my gut is going with Harris given how things are breaking overall late in the game and with the wisdom of Jon Ralston, who really knows Nevada politics, also giving me confidence.

NEVADA RATING: (barely) Edge Harris

Incumbent Democratic Senator Jackie Rosen is polling significantly ahead of her Republican opponent Sam Brown as well as Harris, so I would argue she has a strong chance to win.

Arizona—11 Electoral Votes

Polling average: Trump 48.7%, Harris 46.6%, Trump +2.2 points

Arizona is currently by far Trump’s best-polling state, but is still within the margin of error in a climate in which, again, I think most polls are undercounting Democratic support.  So what does the modeled partisanship of new registrations based on registration data tell us?    

New registration modeled party share: Last updated October 21

Vs. same weeks before election in 2020: Democrats +13.3 points, GOP -19.1 points, net shift +32.4 points net shift for Democrats

This is the most significant shift vs. 2020 for any swing state, and that almost speaks for itself, casting serious doubt as to the accuracy of the neck-and-neck polling.  On top of this, the Puerto Rican factor here: almost 54,000 people and Uncommitted was not on the ballot in a state Trump lost by less than 11,000 votes.  While Trump is up a few points in the poll, this massive shift in voter registration makes me think the polls in Arizona are significantly underestimating Democratic votes.  Trump has a real shot to win Arizona, sure, but Harris should be favored and not just barely.

ARIZONA RATING: Advantage Harris

Also, in the race to fill the vacancy left by departing Arizona Senator and former Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, Democratic Candidate Ruben Gallego has been polling very well against his opponent, the failed Republican 2020 gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who refused to concede defeat and supports Trump’s election denialism.  Gallego has a very strong chance of winning.

My Dark Horses

Yes, there can be some shocks!

Alaska—3 Electoral Votes

Polling: Average not given, but all polls since September have been conducted by the same pollster and all were at least +8 Trump except for one poll in mid-September that had Trump only up 5 points.  Based on this, it would seem safe to rule Harris out for winning Alaska, except…

New registration modeled party share: Last updated October 21

Vs. same weeks before election in: Democrats +8.5 points, GOP -17.8 points: net shift +26.3 points for Democrats

That’s a huge deal, dear readers: Trump only won Alaska by some 36,000 votes (10% of the vote in such a low-population state), meaning a shift of a little over 18,000 votes (5%) would have given Biden the state.

And in 2022, Alaskans voted to send to the House as their one representative the amazing Mary Peltola, the state’s first Democrat to fill that seat and first Alaska Native to do so.  I really expect her to help drive a big Alaska Native turnout, and the registration data is also showing this, with Alaska Natives as a share of voter registrations nearly 43% higher than in 2022, meaning they are 43% more of the share of new registrants (Native American/Alaska Native coded as NAAN in TargetSmart in the above).  There was also no Uncommitted on the ballot in the Democratic primary, but there are over 10,000 Puerto Ricans in Alaska.  And finally, in a state with such a small population, the fact that RFK Jr. is still on the ballot here could also make a difference.  So if a state not at all on the radar is a surprise flip, I’m saying that state will be Alaska.

ALASKA RATING: Advantage Trump but Harris could really do this

Ohio—17 Electoral Votes

Polling average: Trump 51.7%, Harris 43.7%, Trump +7.9 points

Yes, Trump has a sizable lead over Harris.  While it is unlikely Harris will win Ohio, incumbent Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown has been generally far ahead of her and generally also ahead of his Republican opponent, Bernie Moreno, but it’s still a close race.  With my analysis telling me polls are undercounting Democrats in general, I find the best way to feel confident in specific races is corroborating those Races to increases in the share of modeled voter registration partisanship for Democrats where the races are taking place.  So, without further ado…

New registration modeled party share: Last updated October 10

Vs. same weeks before election in 2020: Democrats +18.8 points, GOP -17 points; net shift +35.8 points for Democrats

These are remarkable numbers for Ohio and a larger shift than any of the swing states and seem quite dissonant with the polling.  So remarkable, in fact, that they actually give Harris a real shot at an upset even if Trump is favored.  You would think with sitting Ohio Senator JD Vance as Trump’s running mate that these numbers would be different, but they are not.  The numbers also give Brown a strong chance to win.  Maybe the debunked racist smears about legal Haitians migrants eating neighbors’ pets as well as ducks and geese touted by both Trump and Vance and many other Republicans backfired, as Democrats gained almost 0.4 points in the modeled share 9 weeks out from the election—when these vile rumors began to rise—to four weeks out (when the latest Ohio data is available) while in the same period, Republicans lost about 2.3 points…  Back to the racism theme, here there are nearly 134,000 Puerto Ricans in a state where six years ago, Brown won reelection by less than 300,000 votes.

Sure, Trump is favored, but there is something in these numbers telling me you can’t rule out a Harris upset and it’s would not be a miracle to happen.

OHIO RATING: Advantage Trump

Texas—40 Electoral Votes

Polling average: Trump 51.2%, Harris 44.0%, Trump +7.2 points

It sure doesn’t look good for Harris here, but like in Ohio, the Senate is a different story, and also like in Ohio, the registration information is shocking.

New registration modeled party share: Last updated October 11

Vs. same weeks before election in 2020: Democrats +11.1 points, GOP -18.5 points: net shift +29.6 points for Democrats

Yet another massive shift for Democrats in a supposedly safe state for Republicans.  And there are over 269,000 Puerto Ricans here who might make a difference here in a state in which incumbent Republican Senator Ted Cruz only won his 2018 Senate reelection against Democrat Beto O’Rourke by less than 215,000 votes.  These Puerto Ricans may help the state say “adios” to Cruz, as his Democratic challenger, former NFL player Colin Allred, currently serving in the U.S. House for Texas, is polling much better than Harris, Cruz polling much worse than Trump.  But given these blowout numbers on modeled registration partisanship, Harris has a real if relatively small chance, too.  As for Trump, he won by over 631,000 votes (yes, Texas is a big state).  When it comes to Uncommitted, it was not on the ballot in Texas.

TEXAS RATING: Advantage Trump

And I’d give Allred an edge over Cruz since I already think the polls are undercounting Democratic support and because there is such a huge shift in favor of Democrats.

All Swing States

New registration modeled party share 5 weeks out vs. same in 2020 (rough since not all states reporting on same dates, so October data not included):

Democrats +3.7 points, GOP -5.4 points, net shift +9.1 points for Democrats

Other Notes from Outside the Battleground States

Florida seemed it might be competitive in polling for a bit, but polling has now given Trump an even larger lead and modeled voter registration partisanship based on favorable voter registration partisanship data for Republicans from there as of September 30 seems to rule out a major upset there, though if somehow this changes dramatically with data in October months, maybe there’s a miracle waiting for Harris. Update November 4: Incumbent Republican Senator Rick Scott is underperforming compared to Trump, and while he is in a strong position to be expected win, Democrat Debbie Mucarsel-Powell would have a small chance if there was a shift in new registrations for October and/or polls are way off and Harris is competitive or winning in a place like Iowa, for, while a decent number of polls gave Scott a large lead, a decent number down the stretch did show a closer race, though none had Mucarsel-Powell ahead or closer than 3 points behind.  Virginia had hinted at being competitive in a few polls—though I never bought that this would be the case closer to the election and when the final votes were tallied—but no longer, and with the same type of registration data and modeling current as of October 18 overwhelmingly favoring Democrats, it seems impossible for Trump to win now.  And quirky New Hampshire flirted with Trump in a few polls, but Harris seems to have pulled away there, too (New Hampshire has not provided registration data, as it is wont to quirk).

There is no reason to think Harris can win Montana, but that state’s embattled incumbent Senator Jon Tester is a different story.  Until recently, he was trailing significantly, every poll from August 12 through October 8 having his opponent, Republican Tim Sheehy, ahead 6-8 points (save one that had Tester up 5 points from August 14 and several were GOP partisan polls).  But the last two polls in October have Tester tied or only down three, a decent sign the race may very well be tightening significantly, suggesting Tester has at least a decent chance to hang on.  Yet the voter registration shifts up to October 21 there were massively favoring Republicans, making it less likely than in other states that the polls are significantly underestimating Democratic support.  Thus, without any significant data favoring Democrats here, Tester is easily the most vulnerable incumbent Democrat.  Yet don’t count him out yet—momentum does seem to be in his favor now and recent polling is likely a reflection of multiple serious scandals that have embroiled Sheehy—a relative newcomer to the state—in the final weeks of this race, calling into question his credibility and character.  If future polling before the election comes out showing a tighter race or even tester up again, I would favor Tester in a state where even slight shifts can make a huge difference in state with such a small population.  Still, with the available data, Sheehy has an edge for now, but one he is in danger of losing in these final days.

And finally, polling in congressional districts and voter registration data in the two states, Maine (registration data as of October 15) and Nebraska, that award electoral votes the winners of the districts, do not seem competitive: Maine’s 2nd Congressional District (1 electoral vote) seems to be safely going to Trump and Harris seems a safe bet to win Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District (also 1 electoral vote).  A big shift towards Democrats in the share of new registrants in Nebraska statewide (with data as of September 30) doesn’t just help Harris in the split district favoring her: it bodes ill for incumbent Republican Senator Deb Fischer against the surprisingly very-competitive-in-polling independent candidate, Dan Osborn (+12 points for Democrats, -11.2 for Republicans, a net shift of +32.2 points for Democrats as of September 30!).  My money would definitely be on a strong chance for Osborn here.

NATIONALLY

Popular vote: Harris 48.1%, Trump 46.7%, Harris +1.4 points

I don’t think for a second that Harris only wins the popular vote by 1.4% unless maybe she loses the Electoral College and even then she might beat that polling.  As I have stated throughout, I think polls are generally undercounting Democratic support, whose coalition runs from Republican President George W. Bush’s Vice President, Dick Cheney, and his daughter and former third-highest Republican leader in the House, Liz Cheney, and former Republican Congressmen Joe Walsh and Adam Kinzinger on one side, to Nancy Pelosi and AOC and Bernie Sanders on the other, to include never-Trumper Republicans and pro-lifers who do not want to impose their views on others and still others keeping their vote a secret for various reasons (including many married people from their partners).  But as we have seen in 2016 and 2000, the popular vote winner does not always win.  Yet as far as the popular vote, feel free to add a few points to her total here.

New registration modeled party share vs 2020, 3 weeks out (rough, because of different reporting times and because New Hampshire and North Dakota are not reporting information):

Democrats +3.2 points, Republicans -4 points, net shift +7.2 points for Democrats nationally

It seems almost impossible for Trump to win the popular vote with a shift like that from 2020 to 2024.  So expect Harris to win the popular vote no matter what and to win by more than 1.4% and more than just a little more.

ELECTORAL COLLEGE

The way I see this, and this is a rough probability breakdown, there’s a 20% chance of Trump edging out Harris, a 30% of Harris edging out Trump, and 30% chance of a strong defeat of Trump, and a 20% chance of a huge win for Harris (all maps from 270toWin) *UPDATE NOVEMBER 3: Iowa!

Edge Trump Map: 277-293* Trump, 245-261* Harris (roughly 20% chance)

*I am really bullish on Georgia and Pennsylvania for Harris and think she would win both even if Trump wins, but could see Trump picking off one or the other in theory, though I think this is less likely than what I chose to show in the map.

Edge Harris Map: Harris 272-288*, Trump 250-266* (roughly 30% chance)

*I can see Nevada and Wisconsin going either way, hence the range, but the map is my best guess within these possibilities.

Strong Harris Map: Harris 319-328*, Trump 210-219* (roughly 30% chance^ and this is what my head believes will really happen; UPDATE November 5: ^I am sticking with this as my most likely scenario out of the four maps I have presented herein)

*Even in this scenario, am giving her a shot at Alaska. The range is for Alaska and Hawaii going either way.

Huge Harris Map: Harris 385, Trump 153 (roughly 20% chance but capturing my heart)

Sure, you laugh, but remember that there were net shifts in Texas of +29.6, Ohio of +35.8, and Alaska of +26.3 points in favor of Democrats as a share of voter registrations for this election since 2020!  The polls don’t tell the whole story, and, anyway, I have 80% of outcomes being more favorable for Trump than this.

So basically, a 1 in 5 chance Trump wins, a 1 in 5 chance she blows him out, and a 2 in 3 chance she wins by between a little (1 in 3) and solidly (1 in 3).  This is not meant to be precise, but a rough proclamation.  I thought about tinkering a bit, maybe changing the solid Harris win to 35% at the expense of a Harris blowout, moving that down to 15%, but I want to keep it relatively simple and I was almost blown away by the modeled partisanship registration shares of Texas, Ohio, and Alaska, which I think tell us something big is going on the ground in these places that the polls are just missing.  So I am sticking, officially, with 20-30-30-20 on the odds unless decisive new data pops out in the next few days, which is highly unlikely.

And if I had to pick one and a professional, as noted, it would be the third strong map.

CONCLUSION

There are other factors, such as voters who would normally not vote for Democrats but are increasingly disgusted by Trump’s election denialism and insurrectionism and recent economic developments., that may also prove to be hard-to-measure factors boosting Harris’s final vote tallies and/or margins that I did not discuss in any detail.  What is clear is that the voter registration data shows a lot of drops in GOP-modeled voters’ share of registrations and increases in both Democrats and independents throughout the country, something clearly not being captured by the estimate of likely voter models that are being used to craft the poll samples.

Will Puerto Ricans be a fired-up factor in the swing states and beyond?  I would at least bet on at least somewhat higher turnout from Puerto Ricans for Democrats after the aforementioned disgusting insult was recently blasted live from Madison Square Garden to the nation at a Trump rally which came off like a stylistic homage to a 1939 American Nazi rally that also took place at Madison Square Garden.

One way I could be wrong is if somehow massive amounts of voters who voted for Biden in 2020 will be voting for Trump in 2024, but color me skeptical—highly skeptical—of that being a thing.  As I discussed in my last article one thing is clear: certain groups of voters are registering in highly disproportionate level compared to past elections, and these groups significantly lean Democratic.  And none have surpassed their previous proportional levels of registration as have African-American women and Latinas/Hispanic women.  These historic proportions and the shifts in voter registration during this cycle—the Harris Effect—they have helped lead to fruition tell a story different from the polling, one not captured by polling, and that means we should expect some surprises in the coming days as a nation and the world hold their collective breaths.

In short, the likelihood of Harris winning is definitely significantly higher than the polls would indicate, though of course this does not mean Trump does not have a still real—if significantly less likely—chance, not minuscule one but perhaps a higher chance than of losing Russian Roulette with a six-shooter.

And if she wins, from the information presented here there, it should be clear there is a good chance Democrats can hold the Senate, especially if Tester is able to continue closing the gap in Montana and the independent Osborn defeats incumbent Republican Fischer in Nebraska, helping offset the near-certain loss of the current seat of retiring West Virginia’s Senator Joe Manchin, now formerly a Democrat, to West Virginia Republican Governor Jim Justice in a race against Democrat Glenn Elliot (the Senate is currently a coalition of Democrats and independents that form 51 majority against 49 Republicans (50-50 would be a tenuous majority if Harris wins because Walz as vice president would be the tie breaking vote).

As for the House, there are a number of good polls for Democrats against incumbent Republicans, but House polls are a lot more challenging to conduct and less accurate.  In the end, there is good reason to think there is a good chance that if Harris can ride a rising wave of momentum to victory, so can many House Democratic candidates in competitive races, and Democrats only need a net gain of five seats to take back control.  Especially if Harris wins more than narrowly, expect Democrats to retake the House and hold the Senate, but a more narrow win for her would leave such an outcome in doubt without ruling it out.  Conversely, if Trump wins, with a number of Republican Senate candidates polling well below him, there is more of a chance of divided government.

As with every election, so much is at stake, but so much more is at stake in this particular election: almost everything is up for grabs, including the very nature of our government and the survival of democracy itself.

One favor: when the dust settles, if I turn out to be as accurate as I have been in the past, please do share this profusely so we can improve the level of analysis in our fraught media landscape.

In data, we trust, so trust in a Harris victory as by far the most likely outcome.

© 2024 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

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(Traduce en español/translate to Spanish) By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, Threads @bfchugginalong, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) July 26, 2024, Updated July 27 with more analysis on Kelly; see my related July 5 article, Biden at His Worst Is Better than Insurrectionist Trump at His “Best”: 13 Reasons to Keep Calm & Carry On (Biden’s Already Gaining Ground!) ; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

#1: The Case for Gov. Shapiro

Josh Shapiro is the governor of the swing state that has the most electoral votes (19—tied with Illinois for the 5^th most) going to the Electoral College and is quite popular, beating his opponent in 2022 by 56.5% to 41.7%, a margin of 14.8%, overperforming his FiveThirtyEight weighted polling average by 4.4%.  A selection of polls this year have had him with a 49% approval in late July, 57% approval in May, and 4% approval in March, higher than his predecessors at those stages in their tenure and including significant support from a minority of Republicans.  He was Attorney General of the state since early 2017 before taking office as governor, and before that was a Member, then the Chair, of the Montgomery County Board of Commissioners since 2012, before that a member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives since 2005, marking over 19 years as a public servant for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.  This makes him well-qualified to understand local and state issues as well as both legislative and executive power and politics.  He is Jewish and a strong supporter of Israel, which can shield Harris from false attacks against her and Democrats as being “anti-Israel,” and has been repeatedly described as an incredibly gifted politician.

Per FiveThirtyEight’s weighted polling averages, when President Joe Biden exited the race, between Michigan (15 electoral votes), Wisconsin (10 electoral votes), and Pennsylvania (19), Biden was polling worse in Pennsylvania (behind 4.4%)—where fascist insurrectionist Trump was nearly assassinated recently—than the two Midwest swing states (behind 2.4% in Michigan and 2.3% in Wisconsin), but was polling better in those three states than the other three main battleground states (5.5% behind in Arizona [11 electoral votes]), 5.9% in Georgia [16 electoral votes], and 5.8% in Nevada [6 electoral votes]) as well as North Carolina (6.9%) (16 electoral votes), Biden winning all those states in 2020 except North Carolina (the latter regarded as less competitive, less swingy than the other six states).

Because Pennsylvania is worth the most electoral votes among the swing states, and because the gap in polling there for Democrats is larger there than Michigan but not as large as North Carolina, which may be out of reach, Shapiro is a better pick than other noted contenders, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina.  Additionally, Whitmer is a woman, and two women on the ticket lacks a balance that appeals to broader demographics, while Shapiro is a white man and would be running with a black and South Asian woman, offering broader cross-appeal nationally than Whitmer and likely very likely delivering his state of Pennsylvania for Harris.  That cross-demographic appeal is an important factor when considering Shapiro: the appeal he has to numerous demographics in Pennsylvania as a charismatic white Jewish male is transferrable to both Michigan and Wisconsin as well as the rest of the Midwest because of relatively strong demographic similarities Pennsylvania has with those places.  Thus, what works well in Pennsylvania can be transferrable to the Midwest to some degree, especially Michigan and Wisconsin, crucially.

#2: The Case for Senator Mark Kelly

Mark Kelly brings an impressive resume and is a current U.S. senator serving the swing state of Arizona since 2020, when he won a special election unseating Republican Martha McSally—who had replaced John McCain upon his death through the appointment of the state’s then-Republican governor—51.2% to 48.8% (by a 2.4% margin), then won a full term in 2022, defeating his opponent 51.4% to 46.5% (by a more robust margin of 4.9%).  Before that, he was a NASA astronaut, before that a U.S. Navy aviator, flying many combat missions during the Gulf War.  He is also the husband of former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords, who became famous after surviving a shot to the head in an assassination attempt in 2011, has become a leading advocate for gun control, and will help to emphasize the issue of gun violence with voters, who overwhelmingly prefer the Democrats’ position that stricter gun laws are needed.  Like Shapiro, Kelly is a white male and helps balance the ticket demographically.  As a veteran, Kelly brings valuable national security experience that Shapiro does not and his wife might partially neutralize some of the sympathy working in fascist insurrectionist Trump’s favor resulting from the recent assassination attempt on him. Update July 27: Additionally, as Kelly is an former combat pilot and astronaut, there are the role-model, positive masculinity and hero factors that will provide an exceptional contrast with fascist insurrectionist Trump’s toxic masculinity and false machismo covering for persistent, pervasive, and extreme insecurity masquerading as strength, his running mate JD Vance and the MAGA cult also displaying these traits constantly and brazenly, so Kelly’s qualities in this regard will form a better contrast in this sphere than Shapiro, who is not a former combat pilot nor a former astronaut (though he is still an amazing male role model and still offers excellent contrast as well).

Why Shapiro Is a Better Choice than Kelly

To start, Arizona has significantly fewer electoral votes than Pennsylvania.  Furthermore, since Kelly is a sitting senator, the current Democratic governor would get to appoint his temporary successor but then a special election would ensue in 2026, forcing Democrats to defend a seat in a highly competitive state when the balance of power in the Senate is crucial: Kelley would not be up for reelection, and Biden’s term as president shows how crucial a single vote in the U.S. Senate can be (as I have noted before).  While there are relatively very strong similarities with demographics in Arizona to the other nearby swing state of Nevada, Nevada is just 6 electoral votes.  Given this risk of losing a Senate seat in 2026 that would otherwise be safe until 2028 if Kelly is not Harris’s choice, given that Pennsylvania has 19 electoral votes to Arizona’s 11, and given Pennsylvania’s similarities to the two other swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin each with more electoral votes than Nevada (25 combining the two), the advantages of Shapiro from a Pennsylvania that is far more important clearly make Shapiro the stronger candidate over Kelly, especially give how close the race is in multiple swing states crucial to victory. 

X-Factors Leave Other Options Open, but Shapiro Still the Favorite

An x-factor in any vice presidential selection is personal synergy with the presidential candidate: JD Vance, for example, was selected because he is now willing to defend anything and everything fascist insurrectionist Trump does, even though years ago he referred privately to fascist insurrectionist Trump as a potential American Hitler (I’m proud to noted that’s me applauding the Mitt Romney comment being read as a way of heckling Vance in this video below, and Vance calls me out about three minutes later).  Harris may, then, pick one of these two candidate or perhaps even a different candidate based on personal rapport.  There could also possibly be issues with either of the two above candidates’ backgrounds unbeknownst to the public—think of the skeletons in both John Edwards’s and Andrew Gillum’s closets—that the vetting process could reveal to Harris, altering the calculus and perhaps even pushing her to a third alternative.  Yet both Shapiro and Kelly are longtime public servants that have been well vetted over many years and are charismatic and cooperative team players, so these factors will very likely not count against them, leaving them to very likely be the top two picks, with Shapiro very likely in the lead.  Indeed, the closeness of this race means that electoral considerations will almost certainly play a larger-than-usual role in Harris’s vice presidential selection process and should have played more of a role in fascist insurrectionist Trump’s selection.

I am all in for Shapiro-Harris 2024 to defeat fascist insurrectionist Trump-Vance and their MAGA movement!  And Harris is looking damn strong right now, I really do think we will win and possibly win big! In fact, I think at least ten of the factors I listed in my last article that I wrote would favor Biden over time also work for Harris!

© 2024 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Podcast episode page with extended notes coming soon Eleventh episode on the Trumpist January 6, 2021, attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol, the ongoing Trump insurrection, and their threats to our democracy with Staff Sgt. (U.S. Army Ret.) and former U.S. Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell (follow him on Twitter) and buy his new book: American Shield: The Immigrant Sergeant Who Defended Democracy (Barnes & Noble and Amazon); Warning: adult language throughout

January 6 was about more than a day: it was a months-long, premediated process before that day and that coup attempt is still ongoing in plain sight with the same ringleaders, one of whom is the leading candidate to be the nominee for President of the United States for the Republican Party. People were dies an many were injured—Staff Sgt. Gonell being one of the latter—and it could have been far worse: our democracy has survived but is damaged and wounded and still under threat, its survival not guaranteed. Gonell was there, that day, risking his life and holding the line against a mob of violent, rabid, supposedly “pro-police” Trump insurrectionists, hell bent on disrupting and stopping the peaceful transfer of power this country had experienced uninterrupted from 1797 until 2021, when that tradition was shattered by Trump and his supporters. Gonnell and I talk about that day, the insurrection overall, and his immigrant experience that brought him to love this country and put his life on the line in Iraq and on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol.

PLEASE like, share, and subscribe if you enjoy this episode!

Notes:

See Staff Sgt. Gonell’s moving testimony to the January 6 Committee:

His answering a key question from then Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) during the hearing: “‘I’m Still Recovering From Those Hugs And Kisses”:

See him on MSNBC slamming Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) for minimizing January 6

And see him on CNN condemning those who are insurrectionists deniers:

Also see most of my work on the insurrection here

Specifically, see my Podcast with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Voting Implementation Manager Gabriel Sterling, and Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs talk of the Trumpian threat to democracy and life less than a week before the January 6, 2021 coup attempt

Also see my take on how the worst strains in U.S. history united to spawn January 6 (Jerusalem Post)

And also these three articles: explaining how obvious it is Trump is guilty of insurrection even before the impeachment trial

how the impeachment trial made it even more obvious

how all four of Trump’s criminal cases are deeply related and reinforce each other

and how our politics must be defined by pro-Constitution/rule of law,/democracy and anti-insurrection/Trump on one hand and traitors and treason on the other, à la Gen. U.S. Grant.

Also see my presentations of the two most relevant indictments against Trump from federal Special Counsel Jack Smith and Fulton Country, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis.

On the 140 officers who were injured by the insurrectionists (Washington Post)

Donate here to help injured capitol police & their families affected by January 6

BONUS: the Trump/eagle incident Gonell referenced…

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) April 13, 2023

SILVER SPRING—After disgraced former President Donald Trump’s first (and hardly rushed) indictment, this one at the hands of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (I posted the full indictment here, read for yourself), there have been and are many—oh, so many—takes being offered on television, in print, and on social media.

A few are pretty solid.

But many takes—oh, so many—are hyperbolically dramatic, breathlessly stupid, and/or wildly inaccurate.  Most of the worst takes are coming from the right: wild, irresponsible, and nonsensical accusations of political persecution and miscarriages of justice (some are comparing to the tale of the persecution of, wait for it… Jesus) or literally painting the picture with the exact opposite of what is true.

But there is some criticism that is more measured and nuanced, even partly coming from figures or outlets on the mainstream left or conservatives who have consistently opposed Trump, that “the Democrats” are bungling the timing and/or order of Trump’s prosecutions and this indictment may undermine the other cases arrayed against him, that this case is problematic and “the least significant” and “weakest” of the potential charges and prosecutions should not even be pursued (from The Washington Post Editorial Board!), that prosecutions should be withheld because of how Trump’s cultists might react (Bill Maher), that if this indictment is successful it will fool the left into prematurely thinking Trumpism has been defeated, that this opens a Pandora’s box and sets bad precedents as to how other former presidents and officials could be treated down the road.

Yet many these criticisms are incredibly dangerous and seriously undermine the rule of law and democracy in general, empowering illiberal fascist tendencies in our country that are already out of control and that mean that any major election could be our last free and fair election.

Unreasonable from the Right

The first type of commentary, coming from the right, is exceedingly easy to toss aside.

Firstly, pretty much that entire crowd was saying the same stuff before the indictment was unsealed; they had no ability before that to definitively assess the quality of evidence and charges and most are clearly making their mind up (or lying) based on personal partisan political allegiances, not the law or the facts of the case of which they are in large part ignorant, but there are already indications the evidence will be strong:  two people very close to Trump at the time of his crimes  in question—Trump personal “fixer” lawyer Michael Cohen (who blocked me years ago on Twitter when he was still on Trump’s side in response to my investigative pieces on his shady history operating in Trump’s orbit) and Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg—have already been convicted in directly related successful prosecutions, with Cohen even robustly cooperating with Bragg’s office in its current case against Trump.  Furthermore, key figures deep inside Trumpworld besides Cohen, including Kellyanne Conway and Hope Hicks, have been providing the testimony on which the Manhattan grand jury proceeded with its recommendations and Bragg decided to prosecute.

Secondly, events in question were late in the game in the 2016 presidential campaign but with extramarital affairs that happened years before the 2016 election (all the way back in 2006 and 2007!): that means there is a an overwhelming logical burden that would take extraordinary evidence to overcome to prove that paying off pornstar Stormy Daniels and with whom Donald Trump had an extramarital affair and taking other methods to quash another story about Playboy Playmate of the Year Karen McDougal with whom Trump also had an extramarital affair was not in large part done to prevent new stories of negative media coverage of Trump circulating in the months, days, and weeks before the incredibly close 2016 presidential election, one which Trump only narrowly won and with decisive outside interference from Putin’s Kremlin (which I have explained in detail before), so any idea that keeping these stories secret and using illegal accounting methods to keep this from having to be reported to federal election oversight authorities is patently absurd, full stop: there is no rational way to view any payments or efforts to bury these stories in 2016 a decade or nearly a decade after their occurrence not in large part as substantive efforts to aid the Trump presidential campaign to defeat Hillary Clinton.  Keeping such truthful scandalous stories about a candidate from appearing while voters are making up their minds and actually voting during early and absentee voting—regardless of any other reasons involved—is a massive boost to any campaign in any similar position, including Trump’s, and thus it is impossible to argue that the crimes of misreporting and concealing these financial moves are not directly related to clear violations of federal election law.

Think of it this way: imagine any candidate running for office engaging in illegal financial reporting to hide paying someone with whom that candidate has had an extramarital affair a decade ago and that this payment came at the height of that candidate’s political campaign, then consider the idea that the candidate would have done so at that time only for either or some combination of personal financial gain or to prevent personal damage to the candidate’s family to the exclusion of any political considerations… that second thought is simply nonsensical.  An attempt to argue it was not designed at least in part to benefit the candidate politically is an impossible sell, then, given that even the most inexperienced consultants or students of politics would be well-aware of the political benefits of such an act and would have to know engaging in such behavior would bring about considerable political benefits to any American political campaign.  Unlike other cases, here the intent-as-a-basis-for-arguing-innocence argument falls short in the realm of believability (as oppose to, say, considering Hillary Clinton’s e-mail/server woes under the Espionage Act).  And, all things being equal, again, the 2016 election was so razor-thin-close that any significant alteration of its equation against Trump would have seen Clinton triumphant; thus, it is far from unreasonable to argue that one or more of these stories about Trump’s extramarital affairs breaking late in the 2016 election cycle could have swung the election to his opponent and thus spared the nation the insanity of Trump’s four years as president.

Less Hysterical, Still Wrong

The other type of commentary generally critiques the strategy or risks of the indictment, but these arguments are also logically well into absurdist territory.

We have one case now unfolding from the Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, an elected Democrat, and another that has yet to drop an indictment from Fulton County, Georgia, from its elected Democratic District Attorney Fani Willis, one concerning efforts to overturn Georgia’s election results.  A third investigation into Trump personally for his crimes related to Trump’s (ongoing!) insurrection campaign, his willful theft of classified materials, and his obstruction of justice in relation to returning them and to the relevant investigations is being handled by an apolitical Department of Justice appointee, Special Counsel Jack Smith, who has experience prosecuting war criminals at The Hague.  A fourth $250 million civil case is targeting the Trump Organization, Donald Trump, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Eric Trump, one conducted by elected Democratic New York State Attorney General Laetitia James (and for which even just today, Trump had to sit for some seven hours of deposition).  There is also a civil rape case in New York involving Trump that is set to go to trial and a related defamation case, both brought by his accuser E. Jean Carroll.

While three of the four government officials leading the government cases are elected as Democrats and the fourth is appointed by the Democratic Biden Administration’s appointed and U.S.-Senate-confirmed U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, it is horribly misleading to portray their investigations somehow as being carried out by or at the behest of Democratic Party, including the Democratic National Committee (DNC), elected Democratic legislators in Congress, or any political wing of the Democratic Party, let alone liberal media or political organizations.  These are four separate investigations being carried out by two top local law enforcement officials (from Manhattan, a borough of New York City, and Fulton County in Georgia), one top state official for New York State, and one federal Special Counsel appointed by the U.S. Attorney General, and they are making their own separate decisions.  While there may be some areas where there is overlap between the Manhattan and New York State probes into Trump Organization finances and between the Fulton County and Special Counsel probes as far as Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, the idea that they are coordinating between themselves or with Democratic Party organizations for political framing or advantage as to what, how, when, and if they will prosecute is not only entirely speculative and wholly without evidence, it goes contrary to how these things have worked over recent decades in the American justice system.  While, as noted, there are certain overlapping areas of focus where different government prosecutorial offices might exchange notes or potential conflicts, anything beyond that, especially the idea that these prosecutors are working with Democratic Party leaders in Congress, with the White House, with state legislatures, with left-leaning or leftist media outlets and figures, or with national, state, or local Democratic Party organizations at all, let alone in concert for some sort of political strategy for the coming elections, goes contrary to how these investigations have operated by and large for decades.

(As an aside, let’s contrast this against zealous Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s 1990s investigations of the Clintons when they were in the White House.  It is because of Starr the that special counsel regulations were crafted to replace the independent counsel statute to avoid overreaching politicized witch-hunts like Starr’s, which proved none of the original alleged crimes for which it had begun but did uncover a salacious extramarital affair between then-President Bill Clinton and then-White House intern Monica Lewinsky, catching Clinton perjuring himself to cover up the affair, for which Clinton was impeached, a far lesser matter than the two Trump impeachments, in which some Republicans who were in office for Clinton’s impeachment had voted as representatives to impeach in 1998 or as senators to remove Clinton in 1999 but, tellingly, declined to vote to remove Trump from office as senators during his two far more serious Senate impeachment trials in 2020 and 2021; to add to the extreme irony, Starr himself was part of Trump’s defense team during his first Senate trial in 2020, further cementing who he really was to the public before he died in late 2022).

As opposed to Starr, we have nothing at all to suggest anything other than that Alvin Bragg simply finished his investigation and preparation first and, therefore, filed his indictment first: anyone suggesting otherwise, the burden of proof is on them and no proof has emerged.

So when people suggest that “the Democrats” are not putting their best foot forward by going with these charges first, they are grossly mischaracterizing how these things work in this country.  This is not some coordinated political campaign, and language suggesting that is deeply corrosive to the public’s trust in our institutions of justice, indeed, this destruction of faith in institutions is a lesser side of the coin that Republicans are explicitly screaming and that is one of the key hallmarks of its Trumpism as well as being a disturbing rising trend on the Bernie Sanders-left.  Just assuming bad faith and corruption without strong evidence to support that supposition—in such an unwarranted manner from the beginning before the processes even plays out—is dangerous, and can culminate in even far worse than what we saw on January 6 with the failed insurrection-coup attempt.

What people on the left and other principled Trump critics need to understand, then, is that when they criticize “the Democrats” for supposedly overplaying a political hand in reference to these separate investigations, they are adding fuel to the same fire of cynicism about our institutions that fuels Trumpism’s fascist populism.  The other officials will file their indictments if and when they are ready, but each case will rise of fall based on its own evidence and its own merits, regardless to what any of the other cases lead.  One or more cases may ultimately inform one or more of the others, but they are still their own cases and suggesting otherwise is detrimental to “the rule of law and not of men.”

And the issues surrounding Trump’s first indictment are “serious.”  Especially considering that all this is related to essentially cheating in the 2016 election, no one should view these charges as “weak” or “minor;” as I argued above, the political dimension is not “alleged” or a supposition: it is central to the financial crimes committed just before the 2016 election to suppress decade-old infidelities with a pornstar and a Playmate in a way that substantially politically benefitted the campaign of a candidate in Trump whose most loyal voters were Evangelical Christians (even more so than for George W. Bush, who was himself an Evangelical).

Republicans know this, so does Trump, and they are worried regardless of their gaslighting claiming the opposite.  Why else would drama-queen (this is objective, as he seems to have as his default tone “yell”) Trump devotee and powerful Republican Jim Jordan, preposterously the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, be trying to run unconstitutional interference from Congress already on Bragg’s case, for which Bragg has just sued Jordan, making it clear his Manhattan District Attorney’s office will not tolerate such brazen challenges to the rule of law (see the detailed 50-page filing submitted by Bragg: he brought receipts!)?  If it is no big deal, why not let a free airing of the evidence in the case prove Trump’s innocence, as a failure to convict would surely help Trump?  The answer is fear that the case may actually turn out to be strong.

As to the order of the charges, why not begin with the earliest of Trump’s crimes?  Yale professor, lawyer, and former FBI counterintelligence agent Asha Rangappa adroitly points out that Trump’s crimes for which he has been indicted by the Manhattan DA are the first in a series of major crimes all related to skewing or overturning the outcomes of his elections, followed by accepting Russian malign assistance during the campaign, by his attempts to get Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky to damage Joe Biden politically with a false pretense of an “investigation” in exchange for military aid that had already been approved by Congress (including the Javelin anti-tank missiles that have been so crucial for Ukraine in defeating Russia’s current military onslaught), and the whole series of efforts to overturn the 2020 election through actions such as attempting to pressure Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” Trump votes (see my interview with Sec. Raffensperger conducted just a few days before that “perfect phone call”) and fostering a violent coup-insurrection attempt against Congress, the peaceful transfer of power, and our constitutional order.  In pointing out the linked nature of these offenses and cases, Professor Rangappa obliterates both the argument against the timing of Bragg’s indictment and the idea that the crimes laid out by the indictment are minor, exaggerated, or not worth pursuing.

Rangappa also did an excellent job putting out the structure and merit of Bragg’s case in visual form, whether involving federal election violations or not:

In terms of thinking we should not pursue justice and uphold the law against a man who is wholly unrepentant, still pursuing his crimes, and is obviously still a clear and present danger to our democracy (as in, not behaving at all the way Richard Nixon did after he resigned), well, there is a word for using the threat of violence to affect a political outcome in this way, and that word is terrorism.

When it comes to the idea that choosing to prosecute Trump is opening a Pandora’s Box, I do not take this lightly at all and I have done my own detailed research on how political witch-hunt prosecutions in the ancient Roman Republic (including threatened against Julius Caesar himself) helped to launch a spiral of extreme partisanship that destroyed the Republic’s democracy and brought about the autocratic Roman Empire.  But it is not the choosing to prosecute Trump that is the problem: it is that Trump, unlike any predecessor, has committed such criminal activity outside the bounds of misguided policy and very much about his own personal self-centered conduct, that he is so unrepentant and continues to advertise he will further his crimes, that he makes not prosecuting him worse than prosecuting him as far as the consequences for our nation.

And the idea that Republicans might politically persecute Democrats mainly because of what Bragg and other prosecutors do now is farcical: since Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign, Republicans have been abusing their power in pursuit of political witch-hunts for decades regardless of what investigations or prosecutions are being pursued now against Trump and are obviously already ready to abuse their power with enough numbers on their side in the way people strangely consider hypothetical or dependent on the Trump prosecutions…

Republicans Are the Actual Witch-Hunters

And let’s be honest and more detailed about the track record here:

• Republicans tried going after Bill Clinton for nearly purely partisan political reasons while he was in office and, again, found nothing related to the serious allegations against him.
• They “investigated” Hillary Clinton more intensely than Watergate for “Benghazi” (but really about her e-mails and server), but the nine Republican-driven/led investigations concerning her role in Benghazi were unable to uncover any serious wrongdoing by or fault with Clinton on Benghazi, while James Comey’s FBI correctly determined that Clinton’s issues around her e-mails and server did not warrant a criminal prosecution, however much Comey erred in other ways.
• Trump’s partisan attorney general, Bill Barr—as part of his interference and smearing of the Mueller probe and other legitimate probes into Trump—authorized another partisan in eventual Special Counsel John Durham to investigate the investigators of Trump, an investigation endlessly hyped by right-wing Trumpist media but that failed miserably: of three cases Durham brought, two went to trail with indictments accusing the defendants of lying to the FBI—one filed against Igor Danchenko, a source for the Steele dossier, and another filed against Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer who had been working for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign—both embarrassingly ending in unanimous acquittals by the juries and not convictions.  A third case resulted in a plea deal for an FBI lawyer at the time of the matters in question in which the lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, pleaded guilty to altering a single email related to the FISA court actions towards the Trump campaign staffer Carter Page (whose incredible sketchiness I have previously outlined); the federal judge overseeing the plea deal agreed with an earlier Justice Department Inspector General conclusion there was no political bias behind the actions of Clinesmith and believed Clinesmith’s assertion that he believed at the time that the information he inserted into the email was accurate and that he did not know it was erroneous, with the judge only sentencing Clinesmith to probation and no prison time.  Thus, over three cases involving one judge sentencing and two juries, the claims of a “deep state” bias against Trump and Republicans turned out to be nonexistent, yet Durham’s whimper of a probe lasted for close to four years and cost taxpayers $6.5 million by at least late December 2022; if there was such a conspiracy, Durham would have found it with that much time and effort and he most certainly did not.
• In contrast, Special Counsel Robert Mueller found a lot of damning evidence of collusion and achieved successful convictions or plea deals against thirty-four individuals and three companies with sentences including prison time for multiple targets of these cases; a referred case ended in an additional guilty plea deal for a thirty-fifth individual.
• Trump eventually pardoned three of the more high-profile individuals against whom Mueller earned convictions—Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, and Paul Manafort—as well as two less- prominent individuals Mueller had convicted—George Papadopoulos and Alex van der Zwaan—a clear assault on the rule of law in encouraging others to commit crimes on Trump’s behalf in exchange for presidential pardons.
• It needs to also be noted here also that throughout his time as would-be president, candidate, and would-be president again, Trump has repeatedly threatened or tried to use the government to persecute his political enemies beyond his and his people’s efforts to pressure Zelensky to “investigate” Biden, leading to Trump’s first impeachment.  Even now, he is atrociously calling for Alvin Bragg to be prosecuted for daring to indict him and is calling to “defund” the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice alongside other Republican allies of his.

Conclusion: Do Better, Media

One recent New York Times article proclaimed in its headline “Biden Has the Oval Office. But Trump Has Center Stage,” seemingly blithely unaware of its own leading role in creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of any kind of news coverage environment resembling its own proclamation.  Much of the mainstream press seems blithely unaware of the damage these narratives they are parroting may inflict (as it is wont to do), while Trump and his allies know how damaging these narratives can be and seek to inflict that damage to further their ends, regardless of the costs to our democracy.

The simple facts are these: before the indictment was unsealed, there was far too much mindless speculation about what would or would not be in it when we would clearly eventually know once it was unsealed and, before that, time could have been far-better spent on other topics; now, with the indictment released, there is far too much mindless speculation about the quality of the case and the evidence that has yet to be presented to the jury.  No one would sanely ask the jury to make a decision before seeing the full presentation of the prosecution and the defense, so no one should ask audiences to that now, just as they should not have speculated ad nauseum about an indictment before it became unsealed.  The press can and must do better, and it can start by not giving any more than just a little bit of airtime to these ludicrous and dangerous “hot takes,” if only to swat them down rather than to give them credence.  Then again, the press is already back to covering Trump’s plane on tarmacs and his motorcade, and, for much of 2022, the press was speculating about the 2024 presidential race, so expectations should not be high.

In the end, Bragg’s case may not be the strongest of all the cases arrayed against Trump, but that is not terribly important and Bragg has yet to fully play his hand.  When it does finally get presented, the evidence may very well still be damning and more than enough to erase any “reasonable doubt” as to the illegality of Trump’s financial shenanigans surrounding his hush money payments and their clear link to Trump’s political efforts to attain the presidency in 2016, and commentary that is prematurely dismissive of these realities or of the case’s potential should not be aired or taken seriously by anyone.  If somehow the case fails, that will not because of anything Trump partisans can know yet before the trial and presentation of evidence takes place, and that should be noted any time such partisan blind utterances are spewed.  Ultimately, given what we know so far and the arguments and context I have endorsed herein, when the wheels of justice are finally done turning in this case, it will likely not be a good result for Trump.

What is certain besides the premature nature of the bad arguments criticized herein is that interfering with and attacking valid legal proceedings undermine our democracy, the rule of law, and the principle of equality before the law, all consequences Trump and his Republican Party overall sadly find more than acceptable as part of their pursuit of power and furthering of their illiberal, fascist agenda.

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) January 1, 2023; see related articles from February 17, 2017: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part I: Defining Democracy, Fascism, and Democratic Fascism Usefully, and Spin vs. Lies and Trump, the Global Democratic Fascist Movement, Putin’s War on the West, and a Choice for Liberals: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part II

SILVER SPRING—Not even a full month after Trump’s inauguration, I published a massive two-part essay discussing what I called the rise of “democratic fascism,” with Trump’s victory and being sworn into office one of largest developments on this front.

This is not a democratic fascism as in the Democratic Party of the U.S., but in terms of fascists nonviolently and legally winning elections, using their resulting power to chip away enough at what I have called the four main pillars of democracy—1.) popular elections, 2.) a law enforcement and highly-independent judicial system that is applied relatively equally and not used as a political tool for aggrandizement or persecution (“rule of law”), 3.) a free press that can hold all parties accountable and provide an accurate picture of reality to the public, and 4.) a public free to express itself and not stupid enough to be manipulated too much by propaganda and demagogues, that can make at least somewhat informed decisions based on reality—to twist the system into unfairly favoring themselves and keeping themselves in power as they continue to enact illiberal policies that only further stack the political and societal deck in their favor.

The first part of the two-parter focused on definitions of important terms like “democracy,” “fascism,” and my conception of what I called “democratic fascism.”  In particular, the term “fascism” is highly overused and often poorly understood or defined, a lot like the word “terrorism,” an issue I have previously discussed in detail: as I argued some time ago, “terrorism” must mean more than simply violence or threats of violence from people and organizations we personally dislike, and, similarly, fascism must mean more than the politics of someone or something we personally dislike.  The first part also discussed the difference between political spin and outright lies and how fascism embraces outright lies, as fascism is, among its other horrendous characteristics, a war on truth and reality itself.

In the second part, I looked specifically at why Trump very much fit the definition of “democratic fascist” as I had defined it.  As the word fascist is so strongly associated with Nazis, the Holocaust, and mass arrests and mass executions, I felt separating the traditional conception of fascism from the current wave that was, at least for the time being then, eschewing violent means to achieve and maintain power was useful back in 2017.  But in the roughly five years since Trump’s democratic fascist movement emerged to take over the Republican Party—one of America’s two major parties—and transformed it into a cult of Trump, the leader himself and bulk of that Trumpist movement have clearly transitioned already to accepting and embracing violence and overthrowing the rule of law illegally in their quest to achieve and maintain power, as most notably demonstrated in the culmination of the Trump Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021.  That coup attempt did not stop with its failure on that day, but has since continued through the present. 

Once their embrace of violence and their failure to repudiate Trump’s insurrection became clear, I have felt “fascist” became more appropriate label for them, as the Trumpists are now trying to use undemocratic and/or violent means to achieve power, the latest being MAGA Republican Kari Lake trying to use false lawsuits to overturn her clear defeat in the Arizona governor’s race (I think she is a favorite to be Trump’s vice presidential-nominee in what I think will be his highly successful quest to rewin the Republican Party’s nomination for president).

The rest of my second part detailed how Russia’s Vladimir Putin was leading a global fascist movement as part of his war on Western democracy and how all who opposed such fascism needed to put pettier differences aside to defeat it (a spirit recent political victories in France, the United States, and Brazil embody).

As fascism has very much become an important theme in global politics today—from the Trumpist movement to Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, from multiple political parties in Europe to Putin’s Russia and its war on Ukrainian democracy, from Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel to the Narendra Modi’s India, from the Taliban’s Afghanistan to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, I think it is important to revisit the definition of “fascism.”  In this spirit, I am reposting parts of part one of the two-part piece discussed above because I think they are deeply relevant to our current circumstances. Not all fascism will be as obvious and violent as Putin’s Russian fascism, so a common definition is essential to fight fascism in all its forms (and on a side note, please do see the 10/10 spectacular Andor television series for a beautiful meditation on the nature of fascism and of resisting it).

Excerpt begins:

Fascism comes in many forms; if Hitler and genocide can be one end of the spectrum, there’s plenty of room for fascism that falls far short of that standard, eschewing pogroms and other forms of mass violence, forms of fascism that include what we are seeing now: a democratic fascism (small “d” referring to democracy in general, as opposed to a capital “D” associated with America’s Democratic Party) empowered by populations, media, and elections that rewards and empowers those willing to feed off division and fear as it overwhelms norms, dissenting minorities, and even the law. As this democratic fascism rises, the losers are the liberal democratic governments that have been dominant since the end of WWII; in effect, it is no longer a question of if, as I posed nearly a year ago, but how fast we will see the unraveling of the post-WWII U.S.-led international order. What we do now will define the West and the world for decades to come, but the growing far left must grow up quickly and act within the clear choices of present reality if we are to have a good chance of stopping democratic fascism from destroying our societies, the West, and the international order as we know it.

“American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery.”— Henry A. Wallace, 1944, Vice President of the United States 1941-1945

One can easily go back to the domestic tyranny of Athens’ democracy in ancient Greece, of the will of the demos often trampling over minority rights, to begin a long history of systems that were democratic in that a majority had power and chose leaders or voted on legislation, but with that being the extent of the democracy. In fact, as happens all too often, people—especially when consumed by fear and hate—will choose someone who merely reflects the base instincts of their majority, will use democracy to create a political culture of persecution, intolerance, and even brutalization of those who are not in the majority, will create a system designed to favor and perpetuate the rule of this majority, and will actively suppress those speaking, acting, and organizing against it. 

This is a Tocquevillian tyranny of the majority on steroids, a system where only the people in power and those who support them can even approach having the feeling they live in a democracy or that their opinions count in the public square, while everyone who feels differently is made to understand that even expressing their counternarrative, their dissent, their dissatisfaction will carry consequences for their level of freedom, or even their health, up to and including the lethal variety. Such “democracies” exist to empower the majority or the plurality of those supporting the current leader/government/system and only them; the rest of the population is made to feel that they are tolerated at best by the good graces of those in charge and to embrace their second-or-third-class status meekly and enthusiastically, to be deferential to their oppressors’ views and whims, or else…

Such a system uses democracy to destroy it. Such a system embraces limited (and the most salient) forms of democracy, mainly elections and the right of those winning the elections to rule (and in this case, rule uncontested)…

…the following quote illustrates, if in a slightly oversimplified way, some of the dynamics behind this as far as people and mentalities are concerned:

The following joke circulated in Italy in the 1920s. According to Mussolini, the ideal citizen is intelligent, honest, and Fascist. Unfortunately, no one is perfect, which explains why everyone you meet is either intelligent and Fascist but not honest, honest and Fascist but not intelligent, or honest and intelligent but not Fascist.—Maurice Herlihy and Nir Shavit, The Art of Multiprocessor Programming

Yes, as before, a cadre intelligent people willing to be extremely dishonest are leading a new move towards fascism that wins the hearts and minds of the unintelligent who are honest with their backwards beliefs, leaving a cadre of intelligent, honest, non-fascists to be in the unenviable positions of selling less attractive trusts juxtaposed to often more attractive fascist lies. Sure, there are rich exceptions, but you could do far worse as far as accuracy than categorize most people in politics these days into one of these three categories.

No, it’s not the 1930s, but today, the democracies of the world are collectively facing a cancer of populist, and, yes, democratic fascism that threatens to erase democratic norms, destroy liberal democratic values, and that seeks to remake many of the world’s leading democracies in the image of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its “democracy” that relies on an intolerant majority that understands democracy simply as the gratification of their emotional desires, with dissenters, minorities, and others who don’t agree with them be damned, their complaints of abuse at the hands of the state dismissed and ignored.

Yet terms like democracy and fascism are thrown about quite casually, and not necessarily in a way that is accurate; in fact, I earlier engaged in an exercise in defining the word “terrorism” usefully that amply demonstrates how important it is for a reasonable and universal definition of certain commonly-used-in-our-political-discourse terms to be sounded out so that the terms are spared from being bandied about in a way that virtually anyone can use to make any point, rendering them meaningless and their use pointless.

In his seminal 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell expressed his understanding of how slippery the uses of both “democracy” and “fascism” not only could be, but were when he wrote that

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable”. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.

Such tendencies that flourished in Orwell’s time still, sadly, flourish today, over 70 years both after Orwell penned those thoughts and after the defeat of fascism in Europe. We shall do our best to avoid such traps in the discussion below by discussing the definition…of…“fascism.”…

Defining Fascism

Which brings us to a discussion of what we should understand fascism to be…

“Fascism” as a word in English comes into English in the 1920s from the Italian fascismo, describing the movements (maybe gangs is a better word) that would eventually put Mussolini in power in Italy but a word also alluding to the ancient Roman symbol of authority, the fasces. The English definition of “fascism,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is mainly twofold: “An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization” and a subdefinition: “(in general use) extreme right-wing, authoritarian, or intolerant views or practices;” both are useful, and, especially, the subdefinition is applicable here, but a further, less vague, and more detailed definition is needed for our discussion.

Like “terrorism” and “democracy,” “fascism” as a term can easily become overly and poorly used. Writing in 1944, Orwell noted how “there is almost no set of people — certainly no political party or organized body of any kind — which has not been denounced as Fascist.” Still, even noting the sharp disagreements of the people of his day over who or what was fascist, he noted that “[b]y ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’.”

The enthusiastic admirer of Orwell and recently (and very sadly) late Christopher Hitchens, unsurprisingly, echoes some of what his hero had to say, but goes farther; for Hitchens, “[h]istorically, fascism laid great emphasis on glorifying the nation-state and the corporate structure,” is “based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind…[and is] hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons).” He also describes fascism as “bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories,” as “obsessed with real and imagined ‘humiliations’ and thirsty for revenge,” as “chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia),” as “inclined to leader worship,” and as a “threat…to civilization and civilized values;” perhaps Hitchens’ most pithy description is as follows: “[t]he historic essence of Fascism is the most retrograde people using the most revolutionary rhetoric.”

For Rebecca West, writing in 1935, “Fascism…is a headlong flight into fantasy from the necessity for political thought…persons supporting Fascism behave as if man were already in possession of principles which would enable him to deal with all our problems, and as if it were only a question of appointing a dictator to apply them.”

In his preface to the Third Edition of his The Mass Psychology of Fascism, written in 1942, Wilhelm Reich notes that:

In its pure form, fascism is the sum total of all irrational reactions of the average human character. To the narrow-minded sociologist who lacks the courage to recognize the enormous role played by the irrational in human history, the fascist race theory appears as nothing but an imperialistic interest or even a mere “prejudice.” The violence and the ubiquity of these “race prejudices” show their origin from the irrational part of the human character. The race theory is not a creation of fascism. No: fascism is a creation of race hatred and its politically organized expression.

For U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), one of the handful of men who can be said to have been a primary architect of the successful plan to defeat fascism in the 1940s, he felt that “the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself,” and what stood out for him was that “[t]hat, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.” In other words, when one ruler/party/faction/group considers that it owns the state and that the state’s machinery, power, and largesse exist as personal tools for those in power, when that controlling entity does not feel it needs to share the state, and its machinery, power, and largesse with others different from themselves, we have fascism.

Henry A. Wallace, FDR’s Vice President before Truman, told The New York Times in 1944 that

A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military, clique or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or a political party.

Wallace notes how American fascism is different from Nazi German fascists in a way that is quite relevant today when we are attempting to discuss democratic fascism:

The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

For Umberto Eco, whose own childhood took place in Mussolini’s fascist Italy, fascism was something that could be any combination of a number of key elements. Writing in 1995 in an incredibly prescient and far-too-underappreciated essay on what he termed “Ur-Fascism”—that eternal and incoherent fascist current within humanity—the Italian master saw fascism as something that espouses a “cult of tradition” in a way that was “syncretistic” and produced little if anything original (in this, Eco’s fascism resembles the evil forces in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, which is described here in The Lord of the Rings in a discussion of the nature of Sauron’s orc minions: “The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don’t think it gave life to Orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them.”). He also saw it as a “rejection of modernism” and, in turn, an embodiment of “irrationalism.” For Eco, fascism values “action for action’s sake” in a sense that despised deliberation and intellectual discourse and the intellectual world in general; building upon this, he also noted how fascism is unable to “withstand analytical criticism” to such a degree that “disagreement is treason.” As a natural follow-up to this, he notes fascism’s hatred of diversity and its “exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference,” that (nascent) fascism’s “first appeal…is an appeal against intruders,” making fascism “racist by definition;” it feeds on “individual or social frustration” in a way that is an “appeal to a frustrated middle class” that is “frightened by the pressure of lower social groups;” Eco feared that “the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.” The psychology of fascism is obsessed with identity, particularly appealing to those lost and confused in a changing and challenging world, and offers them a crude way out based on nationalism (for Orwell, “power-hunger tempered by self-deception”), a nationalism defined by exclusion of “enemies” of the nation; this psychology is based on “the obsession with a plot” against them, domestically and internationally. Those subscribing to such a fascist movement “must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies” but also “be convinced that they can overwhelm” them (leaving them “constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.”) With such movements, “pacifism is trafficking with the enemy” and “life is permanent warfare” such that even in victory, there is still a pervasive sense of insecurity, unspoken inferiority, and anxiety. Eco’s fascism is also embodied by a “contempt for the weak” that is crucial for its “popular elitism:” the leaders of the movement convince their mass followers that they are the true elite, even as they thrive by exploiting the weaknesses of their captains and both, in turn, exploit the weaknesses of their mass followers, who feel superior to those not in the movement in a dynamic of trickle-down elitism (“Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on,” as Sinclair Lewis writes in his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, in which a man remarkably like Donald Trump becomes president running a campaign remarkably like Trump’s and ends up transforming America into a fascist dictatorship). Here, Eco continues, “everybody is educated to become a hero” in a sense that engenders a constant hero martyr-complex (often literally reached by death or sending “other people to death”). In fascism, Eco also finds a misogynistic, homophobic machismo that addresses its sexual inadequacy through the “ersatz phallic exercise” of “play[ing] with weapons.” He also finds fascism to be based on a “selective populism” that is “qualitative” not “quantitative” in nature; “the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction,” and “[t]here is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.” Fascism, then, is “against ‘rotten’ parliamentary [i.e.., democratic] governments,” and “[w]herever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.”

Pondering the reality of a fictional German Nazi and Imperial Japanese-occupied America in the 1960s in Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle, a Nazi defector to Japan’s Pacific States of America defines the fascist system of insanity and its adherents as one explained by:

…something they do, something they are. It is their unconsciousness. Their lack of knowledge about others. Their not being aware of what they do to others, the destruction they have caused and are causing. No, he thought. That isn’t it. I don’t know; I sense it, I intuit it. But—they are purposelessly cruel… is that it? No, God, he thought. I can’t find it, make it clear. Do they ignore parts of reality? Yes. But it is more. It is their plans. Yes, their plans…Something frenzied and demented…

Their view; it is cosmic. Not a man here, a child there, but an abstraction: race, land. Volk. Land. Blut. Ehre. Not of honourable men but of Ehre itself, honor; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Güte, but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time…

…They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history.

For long-time New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik,

What all forms of fascism have in common is the glorification of the nation, and the exaggeration of its humiliations, with violence promised to its enemies, at home and abroad; the worship of power wherever it appears and whoever holds it; contempt for the rule of law and for reason; unashamed employment of repeated lies as a rhetorical strategy; and a promise of vengeance for those who feel themselves disempowered by history. It promises to turn back time and take no prisoners. That it can appeal to those who do not understand its consequences is doubtless true.

*****

From these writers, thinkers, and leaders, then, like democracy, we can approach a definition of fascism that avoids the pitfall of being too specific but is still meaningful past use as a simple pejorative, thus avoiding Orwell’s trap as well.

For a brief, poetic, and literary understanding of what we may now say about fascism, allow me to satirize Paul’s lovely passage on love from First Corinthians (by far “Saint” Paul’s best work when compared to the rest of his generally contemptible legacy):

Fascism is impatient, fascism is cruel. It is jealous, is pompous, it is inflated,it is rude, it seeks its own interests, it is quick-tempered, it broods over injury, it rejoices over wrongdoing but does not rejoice with the truth. It bears only itself, believes only itself, hopes only itself, endures only itself. Fascism always fails.

Furthermore, fascism is hateful, irrational, fearful, childishly boastful; it thrives and survives on misinformation and disinformation, lies and deceit; it brooks no criticism and is an eternal enemy of intellectual discourse, debate, diversity, inclusion, and being part of the wider world, relies on racism, bigotry, ignorance, misogyny, and brute bullying in all manners of ways, loves cultish leader-worship, lusts after a false imagined past and “tradition,” is corporatist, nationalistic, incoherent, and contradictory, and is all of these things not mildly but intensely; it takes more typical, offensive, intolerant, and reactionary right-wing politics to a far more elevated level, so that even liberals will wistfully miss their old right-wing nemeses with the advent of the new fascism. There may not be a clear line where it is absolutely obvious where one has passed the realm of the more banal, typical right-wing politics into the realm of the far more dreadful (but still banal) and less manageable fascism (democratic or otherwise), but when one is well past that ill-defined line there can be a sickening clarity, a retroactive realization of one’s fetid new surroundings and a sheer terror that there may not be any going back anytime soon…

Henry A. Wallace…was onto the same truth that Orwell would most masterfully present to the world in his masterpiece 1984 with its concept of Newspeak, a formal language of propaganda, deception, and control: “The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of [the regime], but to make all other modes of thought impossible.” In his earlier-cited essay, Eco also identified Orwell’s Newspeak as the final enumerated element of fascism, noting how it makes “use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.” Eco also echoed Wallace when he noted that

Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.” Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world.

End excerpt

It is my earnest hope that, with the above discussion perhaps shared widely and profusely, we can more easily combat fascism by agreeing on what fascism is, and I do believe that herein I have presented a useable and workable definition by citing minds far greater than my own. From our elections at home to the battlefields of Ukraine, nothing is more urgent than defeating this fascism and calling it out by name and agreeing on what that name means is a crucial step to defeating it.

See related articles from February 17, 2017: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part I: Defining Democracy, Fascism, and Democratic Fascism Usefully, and Spin vs. Lies and Trump, the Global Democratic Fascist Movement, Putin’s War on the West, and a Choice for Liberals: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part II and see all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

Brian’s Ukraine journalism has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others.

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023!

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) December 7, 2022

SILVER SPRING—Sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words, and I could write thousands of words on Elon’s rank hypocrisy, gaslighting, lying, extreme partisanship, and other mendacities—both before and after Twitter—but here I will let a picture do most of the talking:

The context?  “China and Ukraine” was trending on Twitter yesterday.  I, thinking maybe Chinese President Jinping and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had had some sort of chat, was curious, so I clicked on the trend.

And this is what I saw:

Not about Ukraine and China, the first result (and it was not a sponsored advertisement) was a post about Twitter and the decisions it took just before the 2020 U.S. presidential election regarding suppressing content that engaged in rampant speculation about Hunter Biden and what would supposedly be revealed about him and Joe Biden and their assumed “corruption” from a then-unverified trove of content (gigabytes’ worth of) from a “laptop” (or more likely a massive data posting or postings), the parties of which had access to it were keeping access closed and were only releasing unverified bits and pieces for the clear purpose of trying to generate damage against Joe Biden’s presidential campaign and to aid Donald Trump’s reelection.  There was smoke, but the idea that this was a serious fire was not accepted by multiple major media outlets (including the Fox News mogul Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal).  If you think this resembles Russian cyberwarfare and media inanity against Hillary Clinton (her e-mails!) in 2016, you would be onto something…

A lot more can be said on all this and certainly should be.  But for now, it should be noted that the newly Manchild-in-Chief of Twitter, Elon Musk, was only too happy to work with writer (I would say former reporter turned polemicist) Matt Taibbi to release what the duo are calling “The Twitter Files.”  Musk did not choose a mainstream journalist with respect and credibility that runs deep across the political divide; he chose Taibbi, who has a record of extreme bias, slander, and smear when it comes to both the mainstream-Democratic Party-left in the U.S. and on the very obvious reality that there is a major relationship between Team Trump and Team Russia and has been for years (however you want to describe it in any legal sense), one that had a decisive effect on the 2016 election.  He and Musk amusingly claim their Twitter stunt is a real bombshell even though they are trying to rehash the same Hunter Biden stuff at issue late in the 2020 election cycle some two years later, still confusing and conflating the issues of highly speculative and likely specious reporting on Hunter’s personal information on one hand and whether or not those personal files (“the laptop”) embarrassing for Hunter Biden actually existed on the other (again, more on all this in the future).

But the bottom line here: I chose to look into a “China and Ukraine” Twitter trend, and, up at the top of the trend results, not a sponsored tweet, but at the very top of a trend on China and Ukraine was THAT story from my screenshot, a story by the Murdoch-owned New York Post (which exhibited less independence than The Wall Street Journal back in 2020 and led the Hunter Biden “laptop” story charge) about the Twitter decisions from 2020 related to the suppression of the anti-Hunter Biden campaign (even key figures at The New York Post thought that the story back in 2020 was weak and not publishable under actual, you know, journalistic standards).  Nothing about Ukraine or China appear in the Tweet text or the article preview.  But Elon wants you to see it, wanted me to see it, so damn what you or I actually clicked to see; Elon gets what he wants with his new toy.

On Elon Musk’s Twitter, when Elon wants to partner with a problematic “journalist” like Matt Taibbi—full of vitriol and hatred for mainstream Democrats—to do a selective hit-job on Hunter Biden and combine that with efforts to distort and reduce Twitter’s moderation efforts (from and still at a time when disinformation, violence, insurrection, and terrorism from the right dwarfs similar efforts on the left) to suit Musk’s own partisan politics, you can be sure that Musk will twist the platform to push his own pet project into your feed even if you search for different subjects.

This is not “free speech,” nor is it “freedom;” it is the effort of a billionaire malignant narcissist (who seems want to minify and excuse the transgressions of that other less-wealthy malignant narcissist) to hijack Twitter under the banner of those slogans but for his own unstated and nefarious aims, posing as a liberator but aiming for destruction, like Bane in The Dark Knight Rises.  Under such gaslighting, Musk is happy to manipulate Twitter to amplify his favorites and punish those whom he dislikes, all happening silently behind the scenes, not in any kind of transparent way regardless of the meaningless, unsupported claims of Musk’s words of Tweets.  This is the truth of how Twitter is now, how it is after Musk took over with all the changes happening under his iron, merciless, take-no-prisoners rule as Twitter’s warlord. 

In the past, you might see a search result that returned results that were not what you wanted (maybe searching for TED gave you both Ted Lasso and Ted Cruz and you wanted a TED Talk…).  And, to be fair, Twitter has been somewhat broken since Elon sabotaged its workforce, with other nonsensical results happening when I use Twitter, but I have a very hard time believing that Musk’s preferred nonsense being force-fed to me on Twitter is accidental and not deliberate.

Having seen enough of Musk and his modus operandi, to me, this is clearly deliberate, agenda-driven manipulation stemming from the man who has made himself the absolute monarch of Twitter, without him telling us he was doing that, how, or why, while gaslighting us about transparency all the while (so who knows what tinkering might have happened between October 28—when Elon formally took over Twitter—and Election Day on November 8 to affect several close House races that came down to just a few thousand or even just hundreds of votes, that’s a whole other question that may never be answered, something that can and should be discussed later).

“Free speech” and “freedom” for Elon, but forced attendance in the court of the king for the rest of us.

Down with the monarchy.  Down with the king.

See Brian’s related article from December 18, 2019, The Untold Story of the Bidens and Burisma and from December 26, 2020, The Nexus of American Right-Wing and Kremlin Disinformation Exposes Trump-Russia’s Mechanics, both of which are excerpted from Brian’s eBook described below.

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023!

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg, January 6, 2022 (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981)

SILVER SPRING—In part before (especially in the run-up to and weeks after the 2020 U.S. presidential election) but undeniably now, American politics is divided between two major factions: pro-democracy, pro-Constitution led by Democrats and anti-Democracy, anti-Constitution led by Republicans; it has been this way since the January 6, 2021 insurrection.  It is a divide between the first faction that stands for preserving democracy and the rule of law while acting to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” and the second that is against democracy and the rule of law and seeks to destroy our longstanding constitutional order.

There are many other differences—just to name one more recent development, Trump mainstreamed white supremacy: some people will hate this term applied here but even in its most genially presented forms, Trumpism most definitely stands for exclusivist white ethno-nationalism, i.e., the primacy of Americans embodying “traditional” (code: white, suburban, and rural) American values while working to avoid the “diluting” and “replacement” of those people and values with hordes (“caravans”) of (brown) migrants while also working to minimize the political representation through voter suppression of “urban” “non-traditional” communities (code: black and other non-white minorities)—but the January 6^th fault line transcends, should in weight and principle and occasionally does in practice, the more typical right-left divides between liberal and conservative, statist and libertarian, mandates and choice, vaccines and pseudoscience, diversity and homogeneity, social justice and racism, welcoming and nativist, young and old, urban and rural, religious and atheist, gun-controllers and gun-owners.

The historically and morally horrific Trump Capitol January 6 terrorist insurrection should actually be something that unites nearly all Americans in disgust, a clear understanding of who is to blame, and the need to purge them from public political life and see them prosecuted, yet instead, is sadly in many ways a political Rorschach test.  Rather than the insurrection responsible for the first non-peaceful transfer of power in U.S. history since 1797 (Washington to Adams), and the first non-peaceful one between different parties since 1801 (Adams’s Federalists to Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans), for far too many millions of radicalized Americans, it has become just another partisan political issue in which fidelity and fealty to their adopted faction trump reality and morality, muddling what should be crystal clear beyond any doubt for any rational person.  But clarity is what is needed, not this partisan delusion and gaslighting. 

Patriots and Traitors à la General U.S. Grant

One of the primary defenders of the country and the Constitution during the worst domestic crisis in the history of the United States—Ulysses S. Grant, Lincoln’s right-hand man in winning the Civil War against traitorous insurrectionists rebels in another era—wrote just after the beginning of that Civil War on April 21, 1861:

We are now in the midst of trying times when every one must be for or against his country, and show his colors too, by his every act…

Whatever may have been my political opinions before, I have but one sentiment now.  That is, we have a Government, and laws and a flag, and they must all be sustained.  There are but two parties now, traitors and patriots and I want hereafter to be ranked with the latter, and I trust, the stronger party….I would never stultify my opinion for the sake of a little security.

I have argued in detail how exceedingly simple what happened on January 6 was and the role of Donald Trump in it, on how his culpability and how close his coup attempt came to being far worse was revealed especially by his second impeachment trial.  Now, it is clear that former President and General Grant’s dichotomy is the fundamental, basic divide that matters before any other and has been so since January 6, 2021: Patriots—regardless of their “normal” politics (thank you, Never Trump Republicans!)—and Traitors redefining our current understanding of putting party over country.

On the Patriot side against Trump and his insurrection are people like Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), stripped of her leadership role in the Republican party for standing up to Trump’s insurrection, and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, who stood at her side in Congress today as the terrible assault on our democracy was commemorated; Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), a veteran now disowned by some in his family for standing up to Trump’s insurrection, sadly retiring; Georgia’s Secretary of State, Republican Brad Raffensperger, who spurned Trump’s mafia-like pressure to overturn Georgia’s election results and faces death threats and a formidable primary challenger as a result; former Republican President George W. Bush; former Republican Speakers of the House John Boehner and Paul Ryan; the recently departed Colin Powell, a former top general and secretary of state; former Republican Governor of California, none other than the Terminator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who likened the January 6 insurrection to the Nazi’s deadly 1938 Kristallnacht, when anti-Jewish violence erupted throughout the Nazi Reich, including Schwarzenegger’s Austria; the entire body of Democrats in Congress and top Biden-Harris Administration officials; all Americans who know and are unafraid to acknowledge that Trump tried to overturn a legitimate election and destroy the Constitutional order through intimidation and violence; and, certainly not least among these, those security officers who died or were injured or traumatized defending the U.S. Capitol from the first organized mass attack since 1814, when the British military burned the Capitol, the White House, and other targets in Washington.

On the Traitor side: Donald Trump and his top advisors who stood by him during and after January 6; the vast majority of Republicans in Congress, especially those (on the Senate-side, especially Texan Ted Cruz and Missourian Josh Hawley; in the House, 139 out of 211 Republicans, virtually two-thirds) who, even in the hours immediately after the insurrection, voted to overturn a legitimate presidential election based on lies and lust for power or, at best, out of fear for what the mob and/or other pitchforker types would do to them and their families; new candidates seeking to replace state and local election officials; the extremist activists and protesters siding with the insurrectionists; and their domestic allies in the right-wing media—including most of Fox News and talk radio—and social media worlds (Russians aiding and abetting are not traitors, they are the anti-Americans we know and expect).

Insurrection Not Over, Just in a Different Phase

Among the most dangerous of the classes outlined above are the Congressional Republicans and the state and local Republican lawmakers, officials, and candidates who, based on the totally false ideas that the election was stolen from Trump, are seeking new powers to empower partisan election officials that could steal the election for Trump or to replace those who, even as Republicans, put country before Party and acted to respect the legitimate votes checked and audited repeatedly.  Simply put, next time around, Brad Raffensperger may be gone and partisan state legislatures may disregard the will of the voters and certify sets of electors based not on actual votes but partisan lies and machinations.

As James Madison—who, as president in 1814, had to flee the British troops who would end up burning his White House and the Capitol—wrote in 1788 in Federalist “No. 51,” arguing for the then-newly proposed Constitution, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”  Here, he was arguing particularly of the virtues of the divided, separated-of-power natures of the proposed government.

And it was these checks and balances—secretaries of state over state legislatures, election auditors over partisan advocates, courts over campaign lawyers, Democrats over Republicans, the Constitution over election-loser Trump, good-faith presentation of facts and context over propaganda and disinformation, police against insurrectionists, Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) over Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Republican Conference Chairwoman Liz Cheney (then the number-three Republican in the GOP House leadership) over McCarthy and Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) (then-and-still the number-one-and-two House Republicans, respectively), the Legislative Branch over the sitting President, elements of Trump’s own executive branch over himself and his own White House, and (at least at the final moments of the final hours) then-Vice President Pence over then-President Trump—that saved the nation and the Constitution throughout the term of Trump and from insurrection incited by that renegade outgoing president.

Yet, as many have correctly sounded the alarm, the majority of sitting Republican officeholders are working to change rules and to combine with enough victorious candidates or appointee replacements of their ilk to negate that ambition counteracting ambition within their own party that saved our republic in 2020-2021, to demolish the checks and balances that held the line against lies and insurrection and for the Constitution and the rule of law.  The Cheneys and Raffenspergers within the GOP are being put on notice or pushed out—most of the Republican senators who stood up regularly to Trump retired or, in the case of John McCain, died; in the House, of the measly ten Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for the insurrection, two have already announced retirement, four are already facing serious Trump-endorsed primary challengers, and four others are laying as low as they can.

As a result, the terrifying reality is that we may very well (perhaps even likely??) not have enough Patriots to stop one or more crucial swing states from being stolen by partisan state and local election officials in 2024, even in the House and Senate races in 2022.  As opposed to the hastily assembled forces of the January 6 coup attempt (and apart from the related-but-more-general “slow-moving coup” Trump and the Republican Party have tried enacting against the rule of law I have warned about for years), we are now, then, seeing another blatant “slow moving coup” attempt moving forward years before it might come to completion.  Upon closer look, one could even argue Trump’s original insurrection is still ongoing.

Benjamin Franklin, exiting the hall of the 1787 Constitutional Convention after it voted in favor of our Constitution, is supposed to have replied to an inquirer as to what we were getting: “A republic, if you can keep it.”  More than any time since the Civil War, today, we have reason to worry we may not.  This is not idle speculation: most Republican/Republican-leaning citizens believe Donald Trump’s Big Lies about the election and the Republican Party and its base are still in Trump’s pocket, the Big Lies becoming clear litmus tests for most of those who want to win Republican primaries or want to have a future in what is still even now, clearly, Trump’s party.  “While some courageous men and women in the Republican Party are standing against it, trying to uphold the principle of that party,” noted President Biden today, “too many others are transforming that party into something else. They seem no longer to want to be the party, the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, Reagan, the Bushes.”  “Some” is, pathetically, generous, and we must recognize the dire, immediate, and growing threat the Traitor faction presents to us and our republic and how it has hijacked the Republican Party as an overall whole beyond any ability or effort to restore sanity to that Party anytime soon.

Necessary First Steps to Save the Republic

One of the best ways to maximize our chances of keeping this republic is to firmly remember and vehemently proclaim our current Patriot and Traitor divide, framing everything in our politics first and foremost through this prism, with anyone hemming and hawing and not firmly in the pro-democracy, pro-Constitution Patriot side correctly identified as de facto aiding and abetting and giving cover and comfort to the anti-democracy, anti-Constitution Traitor side.  The other key ingredients are to fight gaslighting lies about what really happened on January 6 and to hold those responsible—including, obviously, President Trump, his top advisors, and members of both the House and Senate who worked with them to put in motion the terrible events of one year ago to this day—accountable.  As President Biden himself said today in his most forceful remarks on the continuing efforts related to Trump’s January 6 Capitol insurrection, “This isn’t about being bogged down in the past.  This is about making sure the past isn’t buried.  That’s the only way forward.  That’s what great nations do.  They don’t bury the truth.  They face up to it. It sounds like hyperbole, but that’s the truth.  They face up to it.”

Echoing Grant’s sentiment, there can be no middle ground here (as with, say, Republican Virginia Governor-Elect Glenn Youngkin); we either stand with the Patriots against the Traitors and keep our republic, or we do not and we do not deserve it.  But one thing is certain: in terms of politics, since January 6, 2021, all Americans and all candidates for political office being evaluated up-and-down all ballots from president to county dog catcher are, first and foremost, either Patriots or Traitors; this is the defining shift in American politics post-insurrection and the most important frame for anything political in this current dangerous era.

© 2021 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

A Real Context News Special Report also available as a PDF file

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) June 7, 2021; updated June 15, 2021, to take into account the June 14 NATO summit in Brussels; cited by NATO LibGuide on Cyber Defence; condensed rewrite for Small Wars Journal September 24 also cited by NATO LibGuide on Cyber Defence and featured by Real Clear Defense; see Brian’s related review of one of the most important books on national security to come out in years, Nicole Perlroth’s groundbreaking This is How They Tell Me the World Ends; see his related articles: December 24, 2020, The History of Russia’s Cyberwarfare Against NATO Shows It Is Time to Add to NATO’s Article 5; February 17, 2017, Trump, the Global Democratic Fascist Movement, Putin’s War on the West, and a Choice for Liberals: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part II; and December 7, 2016, The (First) Russo-American Cyberwar: How Obama Lost & Putin Won, Ensuring a Trump Victory

SILVER SPRING—Alliances between nations must adapt to retain power over time, and in no area has warfare evolved more in recent years than in cyberwarfare.  Article 5 of NATO’s founding 1949 North Atlantic Treaty mandates that if an “armed attack” is carried out against a member state, all member states (currently thirty, including the most powerful Western nations) “shall” consider that attack and any armed attack on even just one member state “an attack against them all” and “will assist” it, up to and “including the use of armed force.”  As the centerpiece for over seventy years of the West’sPax Americana, global military power, system of alliances and collective defense, and ability to project combined strength anywhere on the planet, NATO must adapt to the present by adding cyberwarfare—including information warfare—to Article 5.

Cyberwarfare As Modern Warfare

An obvious point in favor of including cyberwarfare in Article 5 is that, by far, the most effective, damaging, and destabilizing attacks against NATO countries since 9/11 have been cyberattacks, most carried out by Russia.  The term “information warfare” (“a new face of war,” quoting a RAND Corporation report) refers to a key element of this cyberwarfare and includes the word warfare to indicate these are hardly benign, normal influence operations and are, indeed, the types of operations that have always been part of any serious conventional war in modern times.  Even in the nineteenth-century, von Clausewitz wrote that “War is…an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.”

The ever-evolving concept of warfare in our digital age, then, does not have to include shots being fired from guns, and it is naïve to not consider cyberwarfare as simply another form of war in the twenty-first century that uses force in the digital realm to achieve results in some of the same spirit as traditional armies: attack, defense, deception, sabotage, destruction, and to pressure actors to change behavior.  Clausewitz most famously wrote that “war is merely the continuation of policy [or politics] by other means” and would have well understood cyberwarfare (sometimes just termed cyberwar) to be war and well within that “other means” category.

The two countries that have led in cyberwarfare are Russia and China, the first (and weaker, but bolder) being NATO’s (and America’s) clearest top state enemy (even if unofficially but clearly in a de facto sense), the second (and stronger, more reserved) being America’s clearest top state rival in a holistic sense, as China has engaged and led in much non-weaponized hacking and espionage (admittedly common among major powers), but has not, say, brazenly released stolen information or disinformation in a way timed to significantly interfere with NATO member states’ elections (as Russia has).  And though China has its own sophisticated influence operations, Russia undisputedly has led by far in acts more hostile than espionage (uniquely so among major powers) since its watershed 2007 Estonia cybercampaign (such campaigns might better be termed cyberassaults than cyberattacks, the latter a broader, far more common term which can even apply to a single high school student’s cyberattacks against his own school district).

Russia officially views NATO as a “threat,” and since that 2007 Estonia cybercampaign, has become far more aggressive and threatening towards NATO, often playing with internal NATO nationalisms and blanketing NATO nations in cyberattacks, including election interference and bolstering of secessionist campaigns, with notable cybercampaigns being carried out against over twenty NATO member states (leaving aside its campaigns waged against non-NATO states). 

Furthermore, de facto, non-declared wars are the most common type of war in the modern era even if the term “war” is not specifically used.  America, for example, has a long history of undeclared war going all the way back to the Articles of Confederation and the early days of the Washington Administration involving conflict with Native Americans and also the John Adams Administration’s 1798-1800 Quasi-War, then popularly termed “The Undeclared War with France.”  Furthermore, as one scholar notes, “the legal state of war is possible without actual fighting.”

Taking all this into account, then, it is hardly unreasonable to consider Russia and NATO in a state of undeclared cyberwarfare and, therefore, a state of undeclared war.  One of NATO’s flagship publications, NATO Review, even published analysis in 2017 acknowledging that Russia was waging “non-kinetic political war on the West.”

In fact, as I have argued for some time, a truly deep look would expose Putin and his Kremlin conducting a clear de facto war to destroy NATO, the West, the EU, and Western democracy; to fracture trans-Atlantic and European unity and even the unity of individual Western nations; and to foment, fund, and favor the rise of far-right ethno-nationalists and secessionists friendly to Russia and hostile to the U.S. and NATO in NATO countries and elsewhere, all while savaging those in the center and mainstream left not preferred by Putin.  The parties Putin helps usually have much in common with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s banally nationalist United Russia party, which has struck up mixes of formal and informal alliances with several significant European political parties in major NATO states. 

Though there have been military moves by Russia in Ukraine and Georgia—two NATO aspirants—the main weapons in its undeclared war on NATO are not tanks, bombs, or jets; rather, they are bots, trolls, and fake news.

The Nature of Russian Cyberwarfare Confronting NATO 

Through hacking, disinformation, propaganda, and other cyber-methods, Russian campaigns that advance this war have been able to affect political outcomes in numerous NATO countries to suit (or, at least, more suit) Putin’s agenda.  These efforts are coordinated through powerful branches of the Russian government and close Putin allies in and out of the Kremlin, often using thousands of fake accounts to artificially bolster the reach of their lies, which, in turn, are augmented within the target countries by native agents and allies (with unwitting true believers long being dubbed “useful idiots”).  In many NATO countries—including the U.S.—Putin is even popular with far-rightists, no doubt in part because of Russia’s robust information cyberwarfare.

Reigning as the supreme disruptor on social media, Russia spews a “firehose of falsehoods” that has been massively effective, distorting and gaslighting the public discourse so that Russia’s preferred narratives are wildly amplified beyond their natural organic reaches, influencing many millions, thus helping to create an atmosphere where disinformation is sometimes consumed even more than actual news and doubt about even basic truths becomes widespread.

Domestic media outlets can be crucial instruments to this end of Russia’s, not only enthusiastic right-wing media outlets, but also far-left media outlets and figures (Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi being two of the most prominent examples); as long as the Russian narratives further their narratives—usually attacking more mainstream and/or moderate parties and figures—these more extreme domestic outlets are often happy to unquestioningly parrot the Russian-projected “information,” and whether it is illegally hacked or not even vetted matters little to them.  The distortions, lies, and unsubstantiated claims then become such a large part of the conversation that mainstream media latches onto this disinformation—sometimes echoing it, other times critiquing it yet still amplifying it—and the Russian narrative itself then becomes mainstream, as I have previously explained in detail.

And once Putin’s favorites are in office in part because of Russian disinformation, they in turn further spout Russian disinformation from the highest levels of the government and even copy Russian tactics (as former FBI counterintelligence agent Asha Rangappa illustrates with the U.S. case).  They also pursue policies favorable to the Kremlin (e.g., weakening anti-Russian sanctions or creating geopolitical power vacuums for Russia to fill) and obstruct investigations into Russia’s cybercampaigns, making it all but impossible to effectively fight back.  Terrifyingly, both America’s 2019 Mueller report and the British Parliament’s Intelligence & Security Committee’s exceptional Russia report released last year note damning examples of obstruction in their respective governments.

With such additional feedback loops, Russian cyberwarfare is thus a gift that keeps on giving, with domestic news outlets and coopted politicians doing Russia’s dirty work for and alongside it.

The Big One: Targeting America

The revelations of Russia’s devastatingly far-reaching months-long government and corporate espionage hacking, known as the SolarWinds attack, and the Russian cyberattack against the third-party-run e-mail system of America’s main international aid agency, USAID (a multipronged attack that used access to that system to hit some 150 government agencies, think tanks, non-profits, and human rights groups that have been critical of Putin and Russia)—both carried out by the S.V.R., Russia’s equivalent of the C.I.A. and one of the main successor agencies of the notorious Soviet K.G.B.—highlight recently exposed Russian cyberwarfare against the U.S., NATO’s largest pillar.

The same can be said for a recent significant attack on major U.S. cybersecurity firm FireEye, almost certainly also carried out by the Russian government, and for two recent ransomware attacks—one on the Colonial Pipeline and one on meat plants of JBS, the largest fuel pipeline and meat producer in America, respectively (in the latter, plants in Canada and Australia were also hit).  These ransomware cyberattacks were carried out by DarkSide and REvil, respectively, two criminal hacking groups thought to be based in Russia or former Soviet-dominated states and that are widely understood to have tacit approval and protection from the Kremlin (to put some perspective in an aside here, it should be noted that after al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks—the only time NATO ever invoked Article 5—Afghanistan’s Taliban regime was overthrown by the U.S. because it gave harbor to al-Qaeda and did not hold the terrorist group to account, refusing to comply with American demands to shut down its camps, hand over its leaders, and arrest the rest of its members).

Much like Russia farms out parts of its aggressive foreign policy to Russian oligarchs, the Russian mafia, and Russian mercenaries in playing a sordid, cynical game of “deniability,” (something I have noted many times before), so too does it work similarly with hackers outside the Russian government.

Prior to the recent discovery of the activities outlined above, Russian cyberwarfare efforts against the U.S. have included clearly and repeatedly promoting unrest and division, pushing both disinformation about the coronavirus and illegitimate conspiracy theories of coordinated massive fraud in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.  Before the election, the Russians’ cyberwarfare effort was all-in on attacking the main political rival (Joe Biden) of their preferred top candidate (Donald Trump).

Of course, division and brainwashing in America have hardly been created by Russia, but it is and has been obvious that these efforts are hardly in vain: multiple credible surveys and any casual examination of social media show that vast swaths of the American public—even many in senior leadership—are buying into this disinformation, believing nonsense about both coronavirus (including millions doubting coronavirus vaccines) and the 2020 presidential election.  All this undermines effective public health measures (literally helping kill Americans) and confidence in the very foundations of our electoral democracy.  In addition, all this Russian content and its fallout obviously does not stay confined to America: international populations’ opinions of America and its political system along with their own views on coronavirus and vaccines are being affected, too.

In the words of journalist George Packer, “antisocial media has us all in its grip.”

The new Biden Administration, then, has its greatest initial challenge—the coronavirus—made even worse by this Russian cyberwarfare even while it will face an unprecedented (excepting Lincoln) crisis of legitimacy in the eyes of millions of misinformed (and disinformed) Americans.

Cyberwarfare a Larger Threat Now to NATO than Terrorism

Russian cyberwarfare focused on election interference in the U.S. in 2016—what I called back in December of that year the First Russo-American Cyberwar—has already caused damage to America, its democracy, and its reputation that is hard to exaggerate, with effects not only still being felt by the U.S. but guaranteed to still be felt for some time.  In contrast, physical terrorist attacks in NATO countries since 9/11, while tragic, have still had comparatively limited effects.  Even Russia’s own 2018 Novichok chemical weapon attack on British soil against Russian military intelligence officer turned spy for the UK Sergei Skripal in Salisbury had more symbolic an effect than anything else, dwarfed by the damage from Russian efforts to tip the 2016 Brexit vote in the direction of Leave or the effect of Russia’s campaign to amplify Scottish secessionism (now increasingly likely and sooner rather than later, an outcome that would obviously fracture and devastate a UK already severely weakened by Brexit). 

As I explained in my analysis of the aforementioned excellent British parliamentary committee report on Russia, Britain’s own official self-reflection made it clear that the solid response (and solid effort to bring in allies to take part in this response) to the Salisbury attack needs to be replicated when it comes to other Russian hostile actions, the clear implication being to include Russia’s cyberwarfare, especially political interference.

The same idea can be applied to NATO as a whole, which does have a Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence located in Tallinn, Estonia.  Yet even today, one-sixth of NATO—Canada, Luxembourg, Albania, Iceland, and North Macedonia—are not members of this Centre, though, encouragingly, the first two are in the process of joining, new members have recently been added, and non-NATO states Austria, Finland, Sweden, and Switzerland are “Contributing Participants,” a status available to those outside of NATO; other non-NATO states Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Ireland also intending to join in that capacity.  There are also plans for a new military cyberdefense command center to be fully operational in 2023 at the main NATO military base in Belgium.

Overall, NATO considers “cyber defence…part of NATO’s core task of collective defence” and has since 2014, when the Alliance first explicitly laid out the theoretical possibility of invoking Article 5 in response to a cyberattack (though only “on a case-by-case basis”).  Since then, NATO has “pledge[d] to ensure the Alliance keeps pace with the fast evolving cyber threat landscape and that our nations will be capable of defending themselves in cyberspace as in the air, on land and at sea,” repeatedly reiterating the possibility of Article 5 being invoked in response to a cyberattack, including just this past September.

Update June 15: A communique issued by NATO from its Brussels summit on June 14, 2021, is heralded by some, including the White House, as a “new” cyberdefense policy but actually reiterates already vague and repeatedly articulated positions discussed above, namely, that NATO states “reaffirm that a decision as to when a cyber attack would lead to the invocation of Article 5 would be taken by the North Atlantic Council on a case-by-case basis,” hence, nothing much really new in actual policy and note the use of “reaffirm.”

Falling Short 

Official working papers, conferences, interviews, statements, and raising possibilities on the subject are one thing, but a concrete, clear policy is another, and NATO has nothing of the sort.

The vague idea seems to be that if a cyberattack was “serious” enough, Article 5 would be invoked, but there is no definition of what this threshold would be, and, frankly, this idea seems rather myopic: death by a thousand cuts is still death and has the same effect as decapitation, so tolerating many smaller attacks and sending a clear signal that there will not be a collective Article 5 response to them is simply bad policy.

Consider, too, that Russia would never be able to get away with flying over NATO skies and dropping leaflets of hostile disinformation by the millions onto NATO populations.  It could never get away with doing so once or once in a while, let alone consistently and during sensitive times of pivotal political decisions or unrest in the targeted countries, and yet this is exactly the cyber-equivalent of what Russia is getting away with against NATO’s most significant member states and many of its smaller ones, too.  And while Russia sending in Spetsnaz special forces to steal sensitive information from U.S. bases in Alaska or use physical weapons to sabotage or destroy government computer systems in Lithuania would be viewed automatically as an Article 5-triggering act of war, the same results over and over again from several years of unrelenting cyberwarfare are not, even though this has done more damage to NATO than any Soviet Army did throughout the decades-long Cold War.  This is, in part, because of NATO: the USSR and then Russia did not dare use armed force to attack any NATO state for fear of that explicitly guaranteed Article 5 collective response (even when NATO-member Turkey shot down a Russian military jet over Syria in 2015).

Yet when it comes to cyberwarfare, NATO is practically inviting Russia to attack and get away with it, with the Alliance quite consistently demonstrating its inability and unwillingness under its current framework to respond collectively to Russian cyberaggression.  As noted in the aforementioned UK Russia report, “Russia is not overly concerned about individual reprisal” against its aggressive acts, most certainly including its cyberattacks, with even the U.S. clearly inspiring no fear.

Language can often be tricky, and terms like “war” should never be thrown about lightly.  But with the advent of the internet and the realities of the modern world, NATO cannot become complacent with preventing traditional warfare while failing to adapt to cyberwarfare.  Pretending cyberwarfare is not war and allowing cyberwarfare in real-world practice to be kept out of NATO’s Article 5—leaving individual members states flailing independently and ineffectively against a determined, capable, and organized de facto enemy content to stand down its conventional forces against NATO while unleashing its cyberunits upon it with impunity—has not discouraged Russian cyberwarfare against NATO, it has encouraged it.  Article 5 makes no exception for smaller armed attacks, and any serious collective cybersecurity defense should make no exception for smaller cyberattacks.

An Urgent Need for Drastic Reform

Throughout New York Times cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth’s recent book This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends—the indispensable, terrifying, definitive account of the development of cyberwarfare and the mess in which we currently find ourselves: a true must-read for anyone hoping to understand how grave is the danger we are facing at this very moment—a constant theme is that we need paradigm shifts in the way we approach cybersecurity, whether the private sector, government, or individual citizens collectively.  You can tell she was having trouble sleeping while researching and writing her book, and we should be, too.

At several points in her book, Perlroth notes that the U.S. in the past rebuffed attempts to discuss some sort of international cyberwarfare convention or treaty, feeling it was the undisputed champion in the cyberarms race and not wanting to give up that advantage.  That ship has long sailed, and just in the last few years a number of rival and hostile governments have greatly managed to shrink, maybe even close, that gap, and with Western countries far more wired than their main rivals and enemies, they are far more vulnerable—with far more to lose—to cyberwarfare.

As FBI Director Christopher Wray recently lamented, the threat cyberwarfare poses to the West has “a lot of parallels” to the threat of terrorism after 9/11.  Echoing Wray, former CIA director and secretary of defense for President Barack Obama, Leon Panetta, warned in a recent interview conducted by Perlroth that he fears we will not do what needs to be done before a “Cyber Pearl Harbor” may cripple us.

Perlroth warns at the end of her book’s epilogue that “many will say” that “these…critical assignments of our time” to deter and defend ourselves from cyberwarfare “are impossible, but we have summoned the best of our scientific community, government, industry, and everyday people to overcome existential challenges before.  Why can’t we do it again?…We don’t have to wait until the Big One to get going.”

How to Revise Article 5 and the NATO Treaty Overall

Considering that the West’s main advantage over Russia is that people like the West a lot more than Russia—manifesting itself in close diplomatic, military, and economic ties about which Russia can only fantasize—the easiest way for the West to face and counter this dire and worsening cyberthreat from Russia is by leveraging its alliances, and, more than anything else, this means involving NATO and involving it in a big way. 

U.S. President Joe Biden himself penned a recent Washington Post op-ed in advance of his upcoming trip to Europe for a NATO summit and to confront Putin face-to-face, writing: “In Brussels, at the NATO summit, I will affirm the United States’ unwavering commitment to Article 5 and to ensuring our alliance is strong in the face of every challenge, including threats like cyberattacks on our critical infrastructure.” 

He can do that by proposing to strengthen Article 5 itself.

With Russia’s rampant cyberwarfare only intensifying and its clear pattern as a bad-faith hostile actor, a paradigm shift in the international system for deterring cyberattacks is absolutely necessary.  Since NATO is the premier defensive alliance of the West, formalizing cyberwarfare’s relationship to Article 5 is a necessary leap forward on this much-needed path and the only way forward for NATO to maintain credible collective defense as the twenty-first century progresses. 

To this end, “or cyberattack” must be added after each instance of the words “armed attack” in Article 5 (e.g., “The Parties agree that an armed attack or cyberattack against one or more of them…” [emphasis added]).

As other Treaty articles have (sometimes subsequently) modified the scope of Article 5, I propose the following definitions of cyberattack are added in a new Article 15:

This crucial definition of cyberattack allows more traditional espionage to stay out of discussions of cyberwarfare for collective defensive purposes while making clear the singular degree of the SolarWinds operation or anything like it will not get such a pass.  It also means there will finally be a way to effectively counter and deter the massive weaponized disinformation campaigns conducted by Russia while also protecting citizens, including journalists and cybersecurity staff, who are on the front lines of this war.

While the Alliance is free to decide how it wants to respond when using Article 5, in many of the situations, appropriate coordinated cyberattacks coming from all of NATO’s member states would be the most conceivable and likely response except for far more serious cyberattacks.

Conclusion: Expanding Article 5 Is Necessary and Overdue

The early twenty-first century’s second decade has been something of a Wild West, with Russia emerging as the biggest beneficiary in terms of cyberwarfare as defined above.  While China has also benefitted in terms of massive espionage and acquisition of Western intellectual property, it is Russia that has used the lawlessness of the cyber domain from a collective security standpoint to engage in the most egregious acts (most recently and most notably with the unprecedented SolarWinds) and ransomware attacks), acts that could easily be defined as hostile acts of war.

The time for lawlessness is over, and, with no statute of limitations on cyberattacks and the just-proposed framework not precluded by the current NATO treaty, NATO would be in its full rights (and is overdue) to invoke Article 5 against Russia now for its cyberwarfare so that Russia’s cyberwarfare will cause Russia far more pain than any damage it inflicts.

This has not been the case, but it must be.

Revising NATO’s Article 5 as suggested herein (leaving aside invocation) will not only clarify the rules for NATO enemies and rivals, but also for the members of a NATO Alliance itself that is in desperate need of clarity and strength on this issue.  It will also make NATO once again an alliance that instills fear in the minds of Russian leaders (as it did with Stalin and subsequent Soviet leadership) who would engage in reckless acts of aggression against NATO or its states, even if “just” through cyberwarfare.

Member states recognizing that they are in a state of war—cyberwar, but still war—with Russia and unambiguously making cyberwarfare a key plank of the Alliance’s main collective defense mechanism is essential, then, to keeping NATO the force for deterring aggression it has been for many decades.

Projecting such strength, both on paper and in practice, will serve as a real-world check against further Russian cyberattacks when inaction and lack of clarity has not, enhancing the security of every NATO member state and perhaps even eventually forcing Russia to a point where productive engagement, not adventuristic brinksmanship, is its chosen priority.

© 2021 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

See Brian’s related review of one of the most important books on national security to come out in years, Nicole Perlroth’s groundbreaking This is How They Tell Me the World Ends; Also see my related article on the UK Parliament’s singularly excellent Russia report and my discussion as a member of a panel with author and Senior International Correspondent for The Guardian, Luke Harding, on Russia’s bad behavior

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

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It was quite obvious that Trump was grossly guilty of incitement of violent insurrection before this Senate trial, but the Democrats’ impeachment managers have done an amazing job of showing how Trump’s culpability, responsibility, and level of involvement in what happened on January 6 are dramatically worse than it previously seemed.

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Twitter @bfry1981, YouTube, Facebook)  February 13, 2021

SILVER SPRING—After the last three days of Trump’s Senate impeachment trial (the first full day had, absurdly, dealt mainly with the constitutionality of the trial itself apart from a powerful opening argument), in some ways the takeaways are surprisingly profound.

In my time as a journalist, I have passionately advocated the importance of analytical journalism: telling a story to readers not by necessarily adding, highlighting, or focusing primarily on new information, but by putting together and explaining all the component parts of complex and/or massive stories, tying together the information from many articles over a period of time and presenting their sum total in a single piece or a few.  Such articles tend to be quite long, which is a major strike in journalism. Another strike is that such work, wherever it will be published, will have to synthesize many articles from many sources other than the publishing outlet, and outlets tend to be rather tribal in not wanting to highlight the work of other outlets so heavily.  And a third strike is that, in general but especially in the ultracompetitive and struggling crisis era of current journalism, the emphasis is, by far, to be the first to present something new rather than to pause and take stock of the current body of information (why is it “either/or,” why can there not be plenty of room for both?).  These three strikes combine to make such deep-dive analytical pieces quite rare, and I have certainly encountered a lot of opposition (sometimes even hostility) from editors and journalists both to anything that does not offer up some juicy new nugget of information and to analytical journalism in general.

As I have noted before, such a rejectionist approach to analytical journalism is deeply myopic while also contributing to the degree to which the public is confused and unable to weight the importance of so many catchy, endless headlines, and there has been no better example in recent years than the Trump-Russia saga, which I have also taken pains to note (and which is the subject of some of my best deep-dive analytical work).

For many of the journalistic powers that be, “original” reporting is only reporting that contain new scoops, not original analysis no matter how significant that analysis is.  In fact, presenting old facts in a new light, new context, and juxtaposed can sometimes be the among the most valuable information and analysis, just as any intelligence agency staff or criminal investigator would tell you.  They would note that, especially when it comes to reading intent—which is often the most elusive information and yet is always among the valuable—it is this type of analysis that is often the most useful: figuring how and why each piece fits together is itself revelatory, and intent is best able to be discerned by putting everything together.

And that is what I feel happened during the Democratic impeachment managers’ presentation of the case against Trump, perhaps the single most important example of this type of big-picture analysis on a main stage in America in years.

I also feel somewhat traumatized by the experience of both reliving the Capitol assault and seeing how the whole picture of it comes together.  It is a bit like being in a battle and remembering your own experience while also being given the full battle report for how your experiences and impressions fit into the wider truth for the first time; many on social media echoed this sentiment, and most of us can only imagine how much worse this is for any of the people traumatized by actually being in or near the Capitol on January 6. 

The day of the Capitol insurrection was obviously traumatizing and terrible enough for most of the wider public watching it on TV and following it on social media, but most of the worst footage and facts would not come out until days, even weeks later (and I am not even getting to the new footage from the Democrats’ impeachment managers).  I did not expected anything to seriously alter my views from this trial that I already have regarded as an open-and-shut case, but the Democrats’ presentation on February 10-11 did just that and did so in ways that shocked me.

In seeing so much context added and all the clips I had seen earlier and then some put together to show when and where the insurrectionists were on the Capitol grounds in relation to members of Congress and Vice President Pence, and showing what Trump said and tweeted and when before and during the insurrection, a far more sinister picture has emerged.

And very much as a result of the Democratic impeachment managers’ presentations, it is now clear that Trump acted throughout the day not only to knowingly foment and incite a mob-driven intimidation campaign with more than a few hints of violence against Congress and his vice president at the hour they were tallying the Electoral College votes, but that he reacted to the violence at the Capitol by supporting, leveraging, and excusing it in a way that he fully integrated the insurrectionists and their actions into his long campaign to overturn the election results, overthrow our government and republic.

Indeed, they embraced Trump and he embraced them throughout.  Many members of his mob cited Trump’s calls that they march on the Capitol as they were storming it and while arguing and fighting with Capitol police, and while running amok on the Capitol grounds they closely followed and even read allowed his tweets issued while he was watching them storm the Capitol, tweets that encouraged and energized them.

Trump willfully misrepresented the mob, said it was “full of patriots” and that it was “peaceful” even when it was obviously not and he had known his own vice president had to be evacuated within the Capitol because his life was in danger.

During all this, besides following the attack on television, Trump’s main concerns were to reiterate the Big Lie that the election was stolen from him, to criticize Pence for not trying to overturn the election results, and to try to call one Republican Senator, Tommy Tuberville—hiding in the Capitol from the Trumpian mob—and use the situation to pressure the senator to carry out Trump’s plan to overturn the election results. 

Hours into the attack on the Capitol, Congress, and Pence, Trump was still expressing support for the insurrection, and when he finally did call his people off—nearly three-and-a-half hours after the insurrection began, plenty of time for his intended targets to be hurt or even killed when he refused requests to call them off or send in reinforcements, even from members of his own staff and Cabinet (a significant number of whom resigned expressly because of Trump’s role in fomenting the insurrection), even from the Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy—he still, in the very same message, justified their actions and reiterated his Big Lie.

At no time that day did he condemn the insurrection or its attack.  This is a man who often tweets back at TV news personalities within minutes of them criticizing him.  Trump was never shy or dilatory about condemning violence (real or falsely claimed) perceived (accurately or inaccurately) to come from members of the left.  Yet when he was within walking distance from an insurrection at the Capitol carried out by his supporters whom he had just addressed in person, there was no effort to condemn their violence.

Both in their own social media posts and, for those now arrested, in the government’s charging documents, it is clear that these insurrectionists were there because Trump called for them to be there, were acting directly in response to his exhortations, and believed their insurrection was exactly what Trump wanted of them, that they were carrying it out because of and for him at his instruction. 

And in all of this, both his “actions and inactions,” to quote Democratic Impeachment Manager Jamie Raskin, speak loudly.  From his rallies to his supporters’ storming of the Michigan State Capitol and, separately, attempting to kidnap and possibly execute Michigan’s governor to the near-running off of a highway of a Biden campaign bus by a Trump pickup truck caravan, Trump has repeatedly not only failed to condemn violence and physical intimidation on the part of his acolytes, he has repeatedly praised them for such acts, which literally led into and fed each other.  Even in the run-up to the rally, it seems Trump was involved in changing both the date of the rally to coincide with the Electoral College counting at the Capitol and to allow the option for attendees to access the Capitol grounds.  The rally itself, date, time, location, themes, and, apparently, freedom to approach the Capitol were all dependent upon or tied intimately to Trump himself.

This is not just lighting a match and walking away.  It is jumping into an explosives warehouse while using a flamethrower.

To understand this, a few clips are not enough: you need to watch the whole presentation, especially on that of February 10 (part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4) but also February 11 (part 1 and part 2).

Before I saw nearly all of this in its entirety, I had still thought it was quite clear that Trump had intended the protest to go to the Capitol, had sought to stir up the crowd and cause them to disrupt the proceedings there, and felt that he more or less just embraced somewhat passively what unfolded after that.  This, of course, for a sitting president is enough for him to be grossly guilty of incitement both from a political impeachment perspective and a legal criminal perspective (two different things, in spite of Trump’s defense attorneys’ attempts to muddy the waters).  But after I saw the Democratic impeachment managers’ presentation, it became clear to me that Trump was no passive observer of what transpired once his crowd left his rally, that Trump deliberately timed his talk to begin just before and last through the beginning of the constitutional proceedings at the Capitol, and that he actively followed and used the insurrection to further his plot to overthrow our republic’s constitutional order and peaceful transition of power, which we had in this country at the presidential from 1789-2017 until Trump’s insurrection, 2021 being the first non-peaceful transfer of presidential power in 232 years.

Even as a passive careless fool, he would be intensely culpable for the insurrection carrying the weight of his office as president, but, as was the case with the circumstances leading to his first impeachment, he knew what he was doing and it was an active campaign in which he was calling the shots and deeply involved to maintain power through nearly any means necessary, no matter how illegal or wrong.  And demonstrating this to be the case with the Capitol insurrection, the case made by the Democratic impeachment managers in Trump’s Senate trial is devastating for Trump and anyone who would defend his actions or claim he does not bear extreme and primary responsibility for the appalling events of January 6, 2021.

Correction appended and updated April 10, 2021 to correct the timeline of events and to add sources related to that timeline.

Also see Brian’s related Jerusalem Report article, Trump Capitol insurrection: The history behind the violence, his related article here, Trump’s Impeachment Trial Exceedingly Simple: No Excuse Not to Convict, his related interview on The Jist Chatter Podcast, and his eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out my podcast interview with Georgia election officials Brad Raffensperger and Gabriel Sterling, both cited in Trump’s second Senate trial!

© 2021 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Twitter @bfry1981, YouTube, Facebook)  February 9, 2021

SILVER SPRING—I am being wildly uncharacteristically simple here, but the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the Capitol insurrection incited by Trump can be distilled to a very few simply points that are not debatable and are crystal clear.

I.

Even before the 2016 election, Trump was laying the groundwork to delegitimize any election result that did not have him as the winner.  Such talking points and an emphasis on nonexistent mass voter fraud were constant themes from Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and throughout his presidency until its violent end, with plenty of direct quotes from Trump and his closest allies well-chronicled by others.  Even during the 2016 campaign, Roger Stone—one of his closest friends, confidantes, and surrogates—had threatened violence against delegates if they did not stick with Trump during the Republican National Convention (Trump himself threatened riots) and said that there would be “a bloodbath…if they attempt to steal this and swear Hillary in;” Stone threatened an “insurrection” back in 2017 should Trump be impeached; and Trump has since fully pardoned Stone for his conviction by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team on obstruction of justice, witness intimidation, and lying to Congress, pardoned him for him efforts to cover for and protect Trump during the Russia investigations, Trump officially condoning and excusing the behavior of Stone with his pardon.  Stone is also associated with several of the groups deeply involved in the insurrection, including the Proud Boys, whom Trump told during the first presidential debate with Joe Biden to “stand back and stand by” (for what?  We now know).   So it was not just recent months, but years and especially the past year in which Trump and his allies (many besides Stone) laid the groundwork for his attempt to overturn the election and to spread a historic “big lie” to radicalize his supporters to be ready and motivated to act on his behalf if he lost.  The “bloodbath” predicted by Stone was only ever so narrowly avoided on January 6, 2021.

II.

Going back to the 2016 campaign, Trump has a long history of claiming the “tough people”—within whom he includes bikers, the military, “Second Amendment people,” and police—would stand up for him and use violence if necessary to ensure he won and/or stayed in the presidency.  Many police did support him, and from what we know, it seems he had more than a few supporters working as Capitol Police on the day of the Capitol insurrection who aided and abetted the insurrection, and even more who did not seriously try to stop it.  This all fits well into the context of Trump’s history of inciting violence.  He essentially was telling everyone “I have a violent mob I can activate if you do me wrong,” and we saw what he was saving it up for.

III.

In this context, especially when two days earlier, Trump was in Georgia railing about how the election was stolen from him one day before the Senate runoff elections there, it all fits neatly together: just watch or read his rambling speech at the “March to Save America” rally organized by his people in front of the White House to his mob on January 6. It is clear, crystal clear, what he is saying and doing: he is calling on his supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol in the middle of Congress’s and Vice President Pence’s official tallying of the Electoral College majority of votes for Biden over Trump (306-232) to interfere and overturn this process, to enact a preventive coup to stop the legitimate transition of power, and to use intimidation and force if necessary, even against his own vice president.  Trump was even happy about the storming of the Capitol and called a Senator hiding from the mob to pressure him on trying to overturn the election results.  Security was deliberately light by design of the Trump Administration and reinforcements were willfully prevented from being sent when they were most needed.  This is not that difficult to figure out.

IV.

Trump was impeached on January 13 while still in office a week after his culminating effort to incite the January 6 Capitol insurrection and a full week before his term of office was then set to expire on January 20. Even though Republican leadership prevented the Senate from convening in time to hold Trump’s impeachment trial before Trump’s presidency ended, now most Republicans in Congress absurdly claim because Trump in no longer president, his trial is unconstitutional, an argument that is disingenuous, against the intention of the Founders, and a vile assault on historical precedent, the Constitution, and basic logic.  Rather than take my word for it, read a letter penned by over 140 constitutional lawyers or another penned by over 170 legal scholars, both representing a wide ideological variety of views—including many conservatives and Republicans—calling out the hollowness of the “frivolous” idea that the current Senate impeachment trial of Trump is unconstitutional, and while this view is not universal in this field, there very much seems to be a robust majority of experts supporting this current trial’s constitutionality.

V.

No links needed here: his trial can be really simple, so simple, in fact, it could easily have been conducted in the final week of Trump’s presidency before Biden took office, avoiding the sham argument Republicans are making now.  Let us just review what is at stake here:

1. Trump was impeached for inciting an insurrection
2. Trump gave a speech at a rally titled “March to Save America” inspired by Trump’s public pressure campaign to overturn the election results
3. Trump riled up, then told and incited his tens of thousands of assembled supporters to march on the Capitol where Congress and the Vice President were carrying out their constitutional duty to tally the Electoral College votes of the 2020 election, which Biden clearly won
4. Trump’s mob went to the capitol and did just that, violently and illegally
5. Trump was pleased by the storming of the Capitol, continued to tweet his inciting lies during the insurrection, praised the insurrectionists, and used their attack to pressure lawmakers and Pence to support his insurrection’s aims
6. All of the jurors in Trump’s trial—our sitting U.S. senators—were literally witnesses to what happened: their lives were in danger and they had to be evacuated for their safety away from a Trump-dispatched mob, of which more than a few people were determined to kill those not caving into Trump’s illegal, unconstitutional demands, so evidence is essentially unnecessary because all the senators lived through it and the vote to confirm Trump incited the insurrection is simply a vote to confirm their own memory and whether or not they think a sitting president inciting violent insurrection to overturn an election result in which he lost is an impeachable offense, not in any real way substantively a vote on “constitutionality”
7. This is not a question of any particular law or legal threshold, though those have been crossed and add to a strong argument; rather, it is a political, not a legal, decision authorized by the constitution to be made by the Senate as to whether Trump’s incitement of violent insurrection is, in the view of sitting senators, an impeachable offense warranting removal from office and the strongest condemnation by the body politic and history, or whether (and which) sitting senators are basically fine with a president inciting violent insurrection against themselves and their own Senate and Congress
8. Most Senate Republicans planning to vote to acquit Trump are pure cowards and unfit for office, hiding behind ludicrous constitutional grounds to avoid having to vote on the clear merits of whether or not Trump incited insurrection because they lived through it and nearly all must know that this is exactly what happened

It is as simple as this: did the senators see, hear, and live through what this nation and they lived through on January 6 (an obvious 100% yes for all of them), and will they adhere to the most basic standards of moral and ethical conduct and conclude that (DUH!) inciting violent insurrection is an impeachable offense warranting removal and conviction by the Senate, or, will they place political party, personal convenience, and the pursuit of power above the republic, the Constitution, and any sense of moral or ethical conduct?

Trump is a mortal threat to our republic, and to set a proper precedent, he must be convicted in this Senate trial and barred from ever holding any federal office ever again, and there is historic bipartisan support for this from Republicans: Rep. Liz Cheney, daughter of Republican Vice President Dick Cheney and the third-highest ranking House Republican, noted that “There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution,” voting with an unprecedented ten of her fellow House Republicans to impeach Trump; trial juror Sen. Mitt Romney, the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in 2012, exclaimed that “I believe that what is being alleged and what we saw, which is incitement to insurrection, is an impeachable offense.  If not, what is?”

If Trump is not convicted, would-be tyrants will be emboldened by Senate Republicans to think that trying to overthrow the system through incitement and insurrection is not a big deal, not even close to enough of a big deal to warrant removal from office.  These tyrants will know that if they try at the end of their presidency to overthrow a system installing a rival to succeed them, a precedent will have been established, that, as long as they and their political allies wait out the clock, they can just leave office with dignity even if their insurrections fail, with full honors and the ability to hold federal office again, even maybe the presidency.  The Senate, especially Senate Republicans and the Republican Party, are on trial here as much as Trump himself, and will be condoning violent insurrection if they do not vote to convict.

That is all I have to say, so obvious is this open-and-shut case.

Also see Brian’s related Jerusalem Report article, Trump Capitol insurrection: The history behind the violence, his related article here, Trump Impeachment Trial Shockingly Makes Shocking Insurrection Dramatically More Shocking, his related interview on The Jist Chatter Podcast, and his eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out my podcast interview with Georgia election officials Brad Raffensperger and Gabriel Sterling, both cited in Trump’s second Senate trial!

© 2021 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

SPECIAL Sixth Episode on Georgia Senate and Presidential Elections: Election Integrity, the Rule of Law, Partisanship, & Georgia’s Elections with Georgia’s Top Election Officials: Secretary of State (SOS) Brad Raffensperger, Deputy SOS Jordan Fuchs, & Voting Implementation Manager Gabriel Sterling. Spotify version here

PLEASE like, share, and subscribe, and even donate if you enjoy this episode!

Three days ago, I interviewed Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs, and Voting Implementation Manager Gabriel Sterling, presented here. Yesterday, President Trump called Sec. Raffensperger, Dep. Sec. Fuchs, and their legal counsel and tried to pressure and threaten the Secretary to overturn the legitimate, repeatedly validated results of the presidential election in Georgia just three days before the two special U.S. Senate elections in Georgia—pitting Democrats Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff against incumbent Republicans Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, respectively—are to take place, throwing the races and the country into further tumult. Most of Trump’s wild conspiracy theories and lies are refuted by my guests in this episode, in which we discuss election integrity, death threats, Georgia’s elections, the rule of law, and the state of our current politics. Special thanks to my guests and especially Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs for making this special, important discussion possible.

Notes

Georgia’s website fact-checking election fraud claims

Viral press conference of Gabriel Sterling condemning lack of Republicans’ willingness to condemn death threats

I am not familiar with Sec. Raffensperger’s record on voting access/suppression, and wanted to focus on this election, but at the very least he did implement an online portal to make it much easier to vote absentee, which we discussed

In 2005, only 37 Democrats in the House and 1 Senator (she making it clear she was NOT trying to overturn the results) objected to certifying Ohio’s Electoral College votes:

In 2021, 7 Republicans in the Senate and 138 in the ​House objected to counting Pennsylvania’s electoral voters, while 6 and 21 did the same with Arizona, on both cases a majority of House GOP, as opposed to the small minority of Democrats in 2005. And in 2021, the intent was to overturn the results from those states.

On Biden and Bork

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

© 2021 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

SPECIAL Fifth Mini-Episode

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Notes:

In this special, brief fifth episode, I do a dramatic reading of my recent article: To Save the Republic, Trump and Trumpism MUST Be Defeated Now and Biden Must Take Office in January. The written version has many links to detailed discussions about issues I touch upon in my piece or to specific information/examples. After my reading, I discuss what’s at stake and what has to happen going forward in this time of crisis and decision.

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s latest eBook,Coronavirus the Revealer: How the Coronavirus Pandemic Exposes America As Unprepared for Biowarfare & Bioterrorism, Highlighting Traditional U.S. Weakness in Unconventional, Asymmetric Warfare, available in Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and EPUB editions.

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here and, of course, please share the hell out of this article!!

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Twitter @bfry1981, YouTube, Facebook)  November 4, 2020 (audio version of this article and podcast discussion here)

SILVER SPRING—Decency.  Truth.  Democracy.  They are not candidates, but make no mistake, they are running and on the ballot.  Trump’s supporters tried, surrounding a Joe Biden campaign bus on a highway in Texas, to run it off the road.  The President himself approvingly retweeted their horrific, reckless act; no one was hurt, but that was never a pre-determined outcome on a crowded highway involving many large vehicles, including a large and hard-to-control bus that could easily have ended up in a fatal accident.  The weather could easily have been worse, it could have been at night, any number of other factors could have been part of the equation and you would not be irresponsible for thinking such factors would not have been high on Trump’s or his supporters’ list of concerns.

Besides sending signaling approval of white supremacists, anti-Semites, Islamophobia, proven liars, grifters, convicted felons formerly on his staff, violent police abuse, a supporter who literally killed protesters in a riot, murderous dictators who continually spit at democracy in its face and fight its practice in their countries and abroad, QAnon conspiracy theorists, and plenty of other deplorables, Trump had amplified the messages of all of them and the one condition is that they support him, period, full stop.

This man loves power for his own sake and for power’s sake, two qualities many of the Founders feared with all their hearts and souls in a possible president.  They even wrote a clause into the Constitution, the Foreign Emoluments Clause, to keep the president from being influenced by foreign powers while in office, a clause of the constitution that he has routinely violated (and gotten away with these violations rather inexcusably).  He even disparages those who serve and die for the nation in uniform.  He approaches virtually everything—even sensitive foreign policy decisions—from one or more of two perspectives: if something benefits himself personally or if something benefits himself politically.

Trump has broken the system so that it still sputters along, but hardly works as intended, making our current system of government not only dysfunctional but “extraconstitutional,” as I noted long ago.  He has literally taken a great leap forward away from democracy and towards a democratic form of fascism (which I noted shortly after Trump’s inauguration), one far less violent than its twentieth century counterparts but far more deceptive in its less physically aggressive ways.  Patriots within the system who are not on board to move America in a sharply fascistic direction are labeled by Trump and his sheep as “the deep state,” but as I noted long ago, even through the failure of Congress, the media, and voters to robustly hold Trump and his minions accountable, these so-called deep-staters—bureaucrats and officials whose loyalty is to the Constitution and the system above any loyalty to Trump, as their oath of office requires—have heroically limited the damage of Trump’s first term, but Trump would be able to whittle them down in spirit and numbers over time, and they have done about all they could up to this point: now, it is up to us to make sure they will not be reduced to martyrs flaming out along with the rule of law and the democratic republic we have had for over two centuries, always flawed but always advancing over time ever since its Founding to correct many of its faults and mistakes. 

This is a historic chance to correct one of those mistakes, one of the worst in American history.

Other than his brinksmanship towards war with nuclear powers North Korea and Iran, nothing Trump has done has been more dangerous than his speech late last night, and certainly none have been more damaging to American democracy, when he as a sitting president attacked from the White House the very concept of legally-cast votes being counted and stated he would go to the U.S. Supreme Court to try to stop both votes from being counted and an American presidential election from being completed.

If anything, Trump has gotten worse over time since taking office; rather than the office ennobling him, he has dragged the presidency to his level and, in many ways, the nation along with it, and far before the coronavirus pandemic exposed Trump’s America as something of a failed state.  It is hard to calculate the substantive damage, not even addressing the reputational damage, that Trump has done to America while in office, but it is not hard to imagine how accelerated his destruction of American democracy and American character would be in a second presidential term, and we should not give him the chance to show us since the American republic would not survive this.

I could write a whole other article about the character and experience of Joe Biden, who is a better man than Donald Trump in every possible way, who has far better ideas and policies in every category conceivable, and who would behave presidentially in every instance when Trump has behaved unpresidentially.

It is not just American democracy at stake, but democracy itself and the idea of a West worth emulating that is at risk if Trump hangs on.   It seems we are entering a dark phase of legal challenges based on lies during which Trump will try to steal the election and disenfranchise thousands, maybe even millions, of Americans.  We must all stay engaged and demand from our leaders at every level that they stand up to this and resist, and it may come to the point where we must stand up and resist the tyranny of Trump.  Our republic is on the brink in ways reminiscent of the ancient Roman Republic, driven there by the crude, delusional narcissism and fraud of a madman and his followers.  No president has done more to undermine democracy and the rule of law more with the arguable exception of Andrew Johnson during Reconstruction, right after the Civil War.  You either stand with America and democracy or with Trump and tyranny.  This is not just “another” election.  With any recent presidential election, any Republican or Democrat winning would not be a risk to American democracy itself, but that is exactly where we are now.  Those of you supporting Trump—for whatever reason—yes, you may continue on as our family members and friends, colleagues and bosses, but this mark, this stain, on your values and judgment and conception of being a citizen will never go away and we will never forget.  Whatever issue(s) or sentiments drove you to support Trump, being so blind to or even accepting his wider damage both to American institutions and to fellow Americans make you his accomplices and neither history nor we will forgive or forget.  We will remember the needlessly, vastly amplified numbers of both Americans who died during the pandemic and migrant children separated from their parents at the southern border.  We will remember that you put whatever narrow interests or myopic fears you had ahead of the collective good of the nation and that you tolerated or even embraced behavior you would never, ever have stood for coming from the other side.  You may buy some goodwill by stepping aside and declining to support the would-be tyrant’s efforts to illegally stay in office after what will almost certainly be his loss once the votes are counted, but your actions have spoken for a part of your soul that we cannot ignore but must find some way to learn to live alongside.  We will go on living in the same country as you, but trusting you as fellow citizens again is not guaranteed and only action to right some of the horrors of this era on your part will earn you respect as citizens again.

For Trump, though, there is no redemption, and prison would be his only fitting next act once he is no longer in office.  But for now, all that matters is this moment: the republic must be saved, Trump defeated, Trumpism as a movement massively contained, and Biden sworn in to replace the Trumpian stain and wipe it away clean as much as is possible from the White House and the nation, though a full cleansing may not be possible for a very long time.

Donald Trump is an existential threat to our democratic system as we know it, and a second term for him would be an extinction-level event for American democracy. Our republic needs saving; let us now, during these precarious days and weeks, stay focused and ensure it does get saved. After that, let us make sure we keep it worth saving.

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Fourth Episode: Election Day Edition

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Notes:

In an Election Day-episode, my old professor, Dr. Mark Rush, the Director of International Education and Stanley D. and Nikki Waxberg Professor of Politics and Law at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, discusses polling in American politics, the 2020 election, the Supreme Court, and partisanship and division in the country.

Link to the Five Thirty Eight polling averages mentioned

Here are links to two versions of the article of Dr. Rush’s that was mentioned

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s latest eBook,Coronavirus the Revealer: How the Coronavirus Pandemic Exposes America As Unprepared for Biowarfare & Bioterrorism, Highlighting Traditional U.S. Weakness in Unconventional, Asymmetric Warfare, available in Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and EPUB editions.

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here and, of course, please share the hell out of this article!!

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Twitter @bfry1981, YouTube, Facebook)  November 3, 2020 NOTE: This map and article accidentally earlier included South Dakota in Biden’s column

SILVER SPRING—This article will be uncharacteristically short, so let’s get to it.

If )we just go by the polls, former-Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris would be winning with an overwhelming Electoral College landslide: according to the essential Five Thirty Eight weighted polling averages, Biden is ahead by small (though not razor-thin) margins in the Southern swing states of North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, as well being ahead similarly in Arizona.  Biden is close in the other key swing states of Texas, Ohio, and Iowa, just behind President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence by even closer margins.  Ann Selzer, the “best pollster in politics,” had Trump a few days ago +7 in Iowa, and I think he will just manage to hang on in Ohio.  Because of the GOP propensity to effectively suppress votes in the South (i.e., cheat), I am not giving Biden any of those Southern states (North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, or Texas, but wow, Texas is purple now…).  However, I think there is a decent chance for Biden take Arizona (and there is an especially-strong, and high-performing, Democratic Senate candidate there in the form of Mark Kelly, former astronaut and husband to former Rep. Gabby Giffords, who survived a terrorist shooting her in the head and became a famous advocate for stricter gun laws), so I will favor him slightly there.  Those weird congressional districts with separate Electoral College-awardings in Nebraska and Maine I am giving to Biden since he seemed to have decent leads there.  His decent lead in Pennsylvania and larger leads in Michigan and Wisconsin seem to make those pretty safe for Biden too (though Pennsylvania less so), so my official Map is Biden 291, Trump 247, with Biden retaking the Midwest states Clinton lost in 2016 that Obama had won 2012.

If I am wrong, it would probably be Arizona and I think that we could also most likely see Florida go to Biden with so many displaced Puerto Ricans from Hurricane Maria living there or that Trump might upset in Pennsylvania with Biden’s comments about fracking and energy policy hurting him there (as a sign of this, Pittsburgh’s Post-Gazette, which had endorsed Obama twice and has not endorsed a Republican since 1972, surprisingly endorsed Trump on economic grounds even though it called his “unpresidential manners and character” an “embarrassment”).  I also think there is a decent chance Ohio could go to Biden.  And a lot of the states mentioned and a few others could go either way, but I think if I am wrong, that is where I will most likely be wrong.

And yet, if the Republican-controlled courts, with the newly installed Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court, get to decide by stopping vote counts or tossing out ballots, the election could be stolen.  But even with a polling error within the margin of error like in 2016, Biden should win with my map, minus Arizona.  I would love to believe Republican cheating will not be effective, but I feel that would be going against history. And it is hard to account for postal sabotage on the part of the Trump Administration.  

Of course, none of this accounts for possible election interference, hacking, or cyberwarfare…

But that’s it.  That’s my prediction.  Biden wins.  The world is saved.

NOTE: This map and article accidentally earlier included South Dakota in Biden’s column

See Brian’s two pieces where he out-predicted all of the mainstream press in picking Biden to win the nomination before early March’s Super Tuesday: Democrats Look Disastrous, But Biden May Yet Save Them from Themselves Starting in South Carolina; & Why Putin Boost Bernie Sanders and The Best Guide to Super Tuesday (no, seriously): Biden’s Got This (and the Nomination)

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him