(Traduce en español/translate to Spanish / Arabic الترجمة العربية / Hebrew תרגום לעברית)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) October 6, 2025; 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 as I make my overdue comeback! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

SILVER SPRING—On paper, officially, “legally,” both the West Bank and the United States have clear ways that security forces are to bound to be applied from any central governing authority in particular areas, deferring to local forces and limiting the roles of those coming from outside. But as both Israel and the U.S. implode politically on the eve of the two-year anniversary of the October 7 Hamas terrorist pogrom against Israel and the beginning of the even larger mass-killing of Israel’s Gaza campaign, it is important to understand how far from reality this description actually ends up being under the current crises both nation nations face.

Wrecking Boundaries in the West Bank

But in the West Bank, Israeli leaders have long ignored many of these supposed restrictions at will, none more so from the top than extremist Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  The West Bank is by far the largest of the three Palestinian territories forming the State of Palestine and occupied during the Six Day-War in June 1967 by the Israel Defense Forces (or IDF, i.e., the Israeli army) and still illegally occupied after all these years (the other Palestinian areas being the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem).  For decades, Israel has illegally colonized these lands and transferred some of its Jewish population illegally to form illegal Jewish settler communities—often of religious fanatics—on Palestinian land, sometimes ethnically cleansing Palestinian communities in the process.   Netanyahu, a champion of the settler movement often nicknamed “Bibi,” has served more time as prime minister than any Israeli, including Israeli founding father David Ben-Gurion; indeed, Netanyahu seems willing to do just about anything to maintain power, including repeatedly prolonging the current horrific “war” (a term loosely applied) in Gaza.  Since the 1993 Oslo peace process began, a three-tiered system is supposed to govern whether Israelis or Palestinians hold civil or security authority in the West Bank: Area A (Palestinian security and civil), Area B (Israeli security, Palestinian civil), and Area C (Israeli security and civil).  In reality, Israel treats all areas as if it can do whatever it pleases whenever it pleases: new illegal Israeli settlements in the middle of Palestinian land, abrupt arrests of Palestinian officials trying to exercise their duties, or raids deep into the heart of the most populous Palestinian cities care not what lines on the map say, and the Israeli political and military leaders have also long since stopped caring (Netanyahu himself bragged repeatedly over the years up through the present about killing the Oslo process that even brought these three Areas about).

Your Posse Is Not Legal, Mr. President

In the United States, possible tensions between the civil and military spheres preoccupied the Founding Fathers so much so that there was no official permanent standing army established by the Constitution and George Washington himself was lionized as a hero in the mold of Cincinnatus for stepping down from supreme military power when his duty was done (and as much for that as anything else he ever did, which says a lot).  There was a bold, idealistic, prescient experiment in Reconstruction (1865-1877)—really the last phase of the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) over slavery—to bring about multiracial democracy that achieved much relying on the deployment and backing of federal troops before succumbing to white supremacist terrorist insurrections throughout the recalcitrant South.  Some dynamics during Reconstruction in the South in key ways resembled the West Bank in that whites in the South eventually used lawless means to establish control over security forces and courts to create a separate-and-unequal system, violating Reconstruction-era constitutional amendments and laws to instead impose a pre-apartheid apartheid system on newly-freed people in the South that would come to be known as the Jim Crow “legal” system and would take most of a century to dismantle.

Simultaneously, while Reconstruction wound down as a failed experiment, Americans were uneasy about the fact that the newly mighty U.S. military after the Civil War had been used so much in civil affairs in formerly rebel southern states, so the Posse Comitatus Act was passed in 1878 to more clearly define the U.S. civil-military divide, already quite strong without it.  The law further codified that the federal military cannot be used for domestic civilian law enforcement purposes with a few exceptions for special, unique, and extreme circumstances often as laid out in very specific laws.  This law was passed in 1878 shortly after Reconstruction ended by both the House and Senate with comfortable margins and signed into law by then-President Rutherford B. Hayes.  The exceptions allow the president to work around or go over the Act in times of severe emergencies.

While there are some issues of “ambiguity” in the Posse Comitatus Act, the long tradition of taking great care with the use of military forces on U.S. soil in non-war settings is clear and Trump’s domestic military deployments in 2025 are not ambiguous in that his premises for deploying them to begin with were flat-out-false or grotesquely unproven, unsubstantiated assertions (“untethered to the facts,” in federal Judge Karin Immergut’s words from her ruling after an emergency hearing in Oregon late yesterday; for this, permanent caricature and White House Deputy Chief Staff Stephen Miller irresponsibly and dangerously called her actions a “legal insurrection” that aids “an organized terrorist attack on the federal government and its officers,” yet another proclamation of open season on the judiciary).  The Trump Administration’s wild claims are contrary to existing publicly available information, with no serious attempts made to counter such information with a proper presentation of demonstrably better or updated information as would be expected under a normal, functioning government.  And though he has far more authority to deploy troops to the District of Columbia, of which I live just outside (so yes, I have seen these illegally deployed forces many times and spoken with them), false premises were still articulated for the DC deployment, so it was still, therefore, illegal before any other considerations are raised (despite raising concerns about the statistics for crime in DC, Trump authorized deployments to the District outside of any federal process to review, challenge, or improve crime statistics reporting in Washington, a common problem many cities confront, and the U.S. Department of Justice only initiated an investigation after Trump’s deployment; any effort to demonstrate any sort of adherence to proper procedure would have seen the investigation happen and conclude far before any military deployment, prove the statistics are clearly false, and demonstrate that officials in Washington were bad-faith and not cooperating or responding to good-faith efforts to obtain cooperation or improve said statistics).

Plenty of scholars have also pointed out that both the intent and context of Posse Comitatus Act and its related laws at the times they were enacted and the spirits with which they have been enforced since are incompatible with Trump’s machinations, not just legally but also constitutionally.  And the main exceptions allowed for and invoked under the 1807 Insurrection Act are for situations totally different than the country finds itself in today: it and precursor legislation saw thirty events in U.S. history result in invocation since 1792, the most recent occurrence for the 1992 L.A. riots. This was notably at the request of California’s governor at the time, the opposite of Trump’s baseless, illegal and unconstitutional deployments there now in 2025.

West Banking America

But the point is, whether in the West Bank of the United States, there are clear restrictions on a.) military forces being deployed in normal circumstances and, even in extraordinary circumstances, b.) when, c.) where, and d.) how they can be deployed.

Yet as noted, for years, Israel and especially Netanyahu have ignored these restrictions whenever they have felt like it and, indeed, have increasingly attacked the idea that these restrictions have any validity whatsoever.  In short, the law is treated as whim, and everyone knows the dirty truth deep down that even some Israelis can admit: the West Bank is an apartheid system, based on religion and ethnicity: ethnic and religious Jews with Israeli citizenship in the West Bank are accorded full Israeli civil rights in the face of Israeli authority, while, in practice, Palestinians (be they Muslim or Christian) have no rights at all and are totally subject to whatever whims and depredations the military rule of the Israeli state and its supporters mete out, up to and including mass vandalism, rampant property destruction, prodigious assaults, orchestrated ethnic cleansing, rarely-punished murders (even of Palestinian-Americans), and indefinite child detention, whether from official government security forces or any number of Jewish settlers engaging increasingly in terrorism with the state’s backing, sometimes far more than tacit.  Even before October 7 in 2023, that year was still the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank since the Second Intifada that ended in 2005, meaning the deliberate escalation in the West Bank by Israel has little to do with October 7, and settlers have even attacked positions of their own IDF in the West Bank when such settlers feel they are not being given enough impunity, showing their lawlessness knows no bounds.  Essentially, you have rights or not based on who Israeli authorities want to have rights there, and they award them to their side while denying them to the other.  Lines on maps, the law, human rights (for those they deemed unworthy) meant nothing, but rewarding their supporters and punishing their opponents is everything.

What has been the obvious “legal” reality for many years in the West Bank—only intensifying more and more over time both qualitatively and quantitatively and now exploding—is now something Trump wants to recreate for all America, turning the whole country into a Wild West Bank of Lawlessness.

But where for Israel, the divides are relatively simple and easy—Jewish vs. Palestinian—here it’s MAGA against everyone, even sometimes other MAGA (some Trump voters are now seeing friends, coworkers, and family members deported, detained, or arrested, even veterans).  If you are a U.S. citizen supporting what Trump is doing and your family and friends also match this description, you have little to worry about when it comes to this (for now…).  But if you are an immigrant who is undocumented/unauthorized who has no criminal record, a legal non-citizen resident—even one showing up for your own immigration hearing—or a U.S. citizen who is either ready to exercise your constitutional rights to ask questions, protest, and confront what is happening or is just at the wrong place at the wrong time, you are not necessarily protected by the law anymore.  Furthermore, by far the vast majority of the human beings being detained and deported are non-violent and non-criminal, whatever nonsense is claimed to the contrary by whomever in power.  And the masked, large, tattooed, angry individuals newly minted as ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents in paramilitary style and other federal fun folks are here to make sure you do not feel safe.  Are you an elected official, including a sitting U.S. Senator, simply asking questions of federal officials?  It does not matter, you can be handcuffed or bodyslammed with the least-protected among us.

Like Netanyahu and too many Israeli leaders in years before, Trump and his similarly extreme, similarly-minded counterparts are hell-bent on erasing, de facto or de jure, the lines the Posse Comitatus Act solidified in the sand on the limits of the use of federal military in a civilian setting, lines for principles clearly enshrined by U.S. Constitution and over two centuries of precedent, principles the Trump Administration is shredding not just in the streets of American cities but even partly also in the waters off the coast of Venezuela.

In seeking to erase legal rules binding the authorization, deployment, and use of federal military forces on U.S. soil in civilian settings (leaving similar jurisdictional mission creep in Venezuela aside), Trump and his MAGA minions with illegal occupation in America are trying to recreate key aspects of the fascist nightmare of the illegally occupied West Bank.  But here in the U.S., this is not based on two warring and competing nationalities and one of those nationalities’ democratically elected leaders pursuing total subjugation at best or actual genocide of the other nationality at worst, broadcast daily for all the world to see and fueled by insane colonialist, imperialist, expansionist fever-dreams based on ancient fantasies and ancient maps, no.  Here in the U.S., Trump is trying to divide Americans on ideological, political, identity, and legal-status lines, lines he will use to award and protect rights for some, deny them to others, still dangle to yet others as ways of obtaining “obeying in advance” or to even explicitly threaten, say, ABC and Disney over a certain late-night host named Kimmy Kimmel.  As JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois fighting back against Trump’s illegal military deployments to Chicago, noted during that drama: “Tyranny requires constant effort.  It breaks, it leaks.  Authority is brittle.  Oppression is the mask of fear.  Remember that,” quoting the amazing antifascist masterpiece that is the Star Wars show Andor.  Yet, we must also remember that, however much Trump and Netanyahu act out of fear of losing power, they are also clearly in the drivers’ seats, consolidating more and more power for themselves in ways the founder fathers of both the U.S. and Israel never intended.

And while there is hardly the level of violence between the sides as in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict even as political violence in the U.S. may be on the rise, dynamics are between the two have been converging somewhat for some time and make no mistake about it, the key principle is the same: longstanding, binding legal distinctions are melting away in the face of determined illegality, such that the law disappears and factional whim reigns supreme so one side can enforce its will upon the other, tyranny replacing law as the very system.  In short, Trump seeks to create a political apartheid here in the U.S., a West Bank of Left and Right, “evil” and “good,” veering Manichaean and not dissimilar in legal nihilism to the separate and unequal system of Jew and Palestinian (or “Arab,” so much less specific…) in the West Bank’s Nablus but bringing it to New York.

Adding New Meaning to “Executing” the Law

To execute their plans, both Trump and Netanyahu have hosts of extremists willing to unquestioningly nakedly embrace the partisanship of their missions, from U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, from U.S. Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth to Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich (all of whom have had their own past issues with illegality or criminal probes well-before 2025: Ben-Gvir and Smotrich being convicted and arrested terrorists, respectively; Bondi in the center of a criminal bribery and obstruction scandal with Trump; and the brotastic Pete Hegseth, well, being brotastic Pete Hegseth…), just to name a few, with far, far too many others alongside.  And these allies have made it clear, sometimes as senior law enforcement officials: if we don’t like you, the law cannot protect you from us and we are coming for you, even for your children.  While in Israel, broadening this behavior to include Israeli Jewish citizens has been far milder than what has been done to Palestinians—even those in Israel with Israeli citizenship but especially those without Israeli citizenship outside of Israel in the actual territories of actual Palestine—Trump and his lawless allies are rapidly casting a far wider dragnet, or at least attempting to do so, advancing on several fronts even as I write this.

Yes, you are witnessing the MAGA Trump Administration’s attempts at illegal jurisdictional jumps dehumanizingly intending to target both directly and indirectly various large swaths of the population in America, illegal deployment by illegal deployment, related measure by related measure, until Trump has created a de facto national federalized police state he can use to prosecute and intimidate his opposition and others deemed undesirable, jurisdictional issues and the law be damned.  They have lost the program when it comes morality, cartoonishly celebrating their roles as oppressors (of certain people) and projecting so publicly for all to see.

Maybe a lot of this should not be surprising, since both men have no problem breaking the law: Trump is an insurrectionist and convicted felon and Netanyahu is currently on trial in three cases in Israel for damning corruption crimes (with Trump, unsurprisingly in true birds-of-a-feather mode, even very publicly pressuring Israel to stop Netanyahu’s trial) in addition to having the International Criminal Court issue a warrant for his arrest in 2024 for war crimes.  Both men are fascists remaking their countries in a fascist image of their former democracies, the actions mentioned herein just some of the examples (I do not use the term “fascist” lightly, but carefully and specifically and with history in mind).

At this point, one really has to wonder if either the U.S. or Israel can still be fairly termed “democracies,” because in key ways, the rule of law is damaged, dying, or dead as both Israel and the U.S.—Bibi and Donnie—continue to feed, rather than restrain, each other’s worst tendencies.

But it is both too easy and too simple to blame just such leaders: voters in both countries could have easily set their countries on different paths—ones that respected the rule of law—and voters in both countries rejected, even if narrowly, the rule of law in favor of Trump, Netanyahu, and the fascism they represent, whether they realize it or not.  And perhaps nothing screams fascist more than violently taking away legal protections for the most vulnerable and defenseless and, in turn, their allies in order to expose the chosen to ever more deprivation and violence at the hands of the same people taking away their rights and protections.

In the current state of Israel’s short history, this could simply mean the end of Israeli democracy.  In the U.S. context, this would be like the success of white supremacist terrorists during Reconstruction in brutally taking away Freedmen’s rights throughout the south, except that Trump is engaging in this massive ripping away of rights not in one region but in the whole country.  2025 may yet be known a watershed year for America, Israel, and Palestine, but only for the most horrific, sad, pathetic, and—perhaps most importantly—most preventable of ways.

See all of Brian’s work on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict here.

© 2025 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!

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!

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!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981, YouTube) August 27, 2020

Author’s note: I wrote most of this in April and May, originally as part of my much longer coronavirus deep-dive, but held off on publishing this part in the hopes that I could publish it with a major outlet, making some edits and additions in the meantime, but I do not want to wait any longer.  So, if you find value in my policy proposal here, please do share profusely!

Winter Is Coming.

—House words of House Stark, in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones (1996)

SILVER SPRING—These past few months, the United States has more and more resembled a failed state (to borrow George Packer’s phrase and Anne Applebaum’s sentiments as expressed in The Atlantic) in various ways to varying degrees as it has produced one of the least effective coronavirus pandemic responses of any nation on earth, as the below chart makes clear:

I have discussed that chart in my late-May deep-dive, big-picture exploration of the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic and its implications, one in which I also pointed out both that the coronavirus pandemic poses a number of dire threats that we are simply ill-suited to handle and that this is the situation, in part due to our overall structural, societal, even cultural inability to effectively confront unconventional and asymmetric threats for much of our history.

Yet as Modern War Institute (MWI) nonresident fellow Max Brooks noted in a Foreign Policy piece, we are not helpless against the threats presented by coronavirus.  These threats do not have to mean our defeat, which “the world can stop…  And nobody has to develop a whole new weapons system to do it.  Unlike all other means of war, where new inventions require counterinventions for protection, from bulletproof vests to anti-tank missiles, all we have to do is change our thinking.  All we have to do is see public health as national security” and “strengthen…cooperation with global health networks.”

Along these lines, in a mid-April webcast conversation with Sen. Bernie Sanders, former Vice President Joe Biden said “I really think we should be thinking about having a new office, a new Cabinet office, on pandemics in the United States,” and this is what I had been thinking, too, in preceding months while I had been working on this piece and my earlier coronavirus work.

Before the next big biothreat hits us—be it a natural pandemic or one resulting from biowarfare or bioterrorism—I propose the creation of a presidential-Cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response (DPPR), with its Secretary a top-tier official on the National Security Council (NSC) appointed to a ten-year term much like the FBI director to ensure a higher degree of continuity, signal the position’s non-partisan nature, and keep the department less exposed to political ups-and-downs.  If 9/11 saw the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as a major part of our national response, this far deadlier coronavirus pandemic can see the creation of DPPR as a response.

DPPR would be a civilian-led joint civilian-military agency, designed to coordinate a national civilian and military response in the event of a pandemic, something of a mini-Pentagon for pandemics but with a higher proportion of medical and logistics experts than anything else but also with strong legal components to navigate the various local, state, and federal legal structures a pandemic would touch, one that would work closely with the Department of Justice (DOJ) and other agencies but still remain independent.

I. The Army Pandemic Corps

Involving the military is essential.  For one thing, because of distinct and clear resourcing, cultural, and structural reasons, the military has a high level of discipline and efficiency relative to civilian agencies, is able to move large numbers of people and equipment with more ease, and can act more swiftly overall.  In contrast, civilian planners and capacities have failed and are still failing spectacularly during this coronavirus pandemic, and a huge portion of America’s coronavirus response has come down to an ad hoc approach, only adding to the confusion and chaos.  As Gen. Russel Honoré (who helped lead America’s response in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina) explained about our current pandemic, the main choices for logistics are between the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA, a civilian agency under the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS) and the military.  But, as he also explained, FEMA is designed to handle one or several localized emergencies at once, not a full-fledged national one; it simply does not have the capacity to run as the point organization for this pandemic.  Instead of needing to create an entirely new civilian apparatus that can handle a national pandemic or slapping together disparate agencies not used to working closely together, building upon existing military structures that already have far more capacity than any civilian apparatus makes much more sense.  And, as will be demonstrated below, there are so many other ways that a large military role further enhances both preparedness and response for pandemics.  And yet, the military in its current state would have a tough time taking over pandemic operations, navigating unfamiliar state and local legal jurisdictions.  Expanding the military with a new Army Pandemic Corps, as described below, will address these issues and put DPPR, including the Corps, in a position to be the best possible entity to handle pandemic preparedness and response.

The DPPR’s main logistical deputy would be a new four-star Army general officer, officially a liaison reporting primarily to the Secretary of Defense as part of the Army and the Department of Defense (DOD) in non-pandemic times and but whose main deference and primary reporting line would switch to the Secretary of DPPR in pandemic times.  This logistics-specialized general would command a single new Army corps of pandemic response professionals—military personnel who specialize in logistics, transport, maintenance, medicine, and protective gear—that would be formally commanded by this four-star general as part of the Army and Pentagon command structure during non-pandemic times, during which it would focus on preparation and training.  But when a pandemic is upon us, the corps would be handed along with its four-star general to the command of the DPPR secretary as a temporarily-formal part of that agency.  Keeping the corps under the same four-star general but switching his position from the Pentagon pre-pandemic to the DPPR to deal with a pandemic ensures a proper balance between continuity and flexibility, both of which have been lacking in our current pandemic leadership.  The switch would be relatively smooth, too, since both the commander and the Corps itself will have spent much of the non-pandemic time liaising with all the relevant actors.  This general would need to be approved by both the Defense and DPPR secretaries and would clearly understand his dual roles, specifically when one supersedes the other.

A large portion of the Corps who would be full-time active-duty military and those who would be reservists would not be allowed to have civilian roles as first-responders or needed medical staff elsewhere (as many in the military currently do), thus avoiding the issues of a callup cannibalizing crucial local response staff as would be the case with call-ups of the National Guard, a problem discussed by Mississippi National Guard Maj. Dennis Bittle in an MWI piece.  The U.S. already has a shortage of doctors and nurses, having to import many from foreign countries.  This Army Pandemic Corps could provide generous incentives to make its positions attractive—including paying for the college and advanced degrees of those who want to bindingly commit to serving in the Corps for a certain number of years—thereby serving as an incubator for increasing our overall civilian healthcare workforce, allowing those who eventually leave the Corps to fill important roles in the U.S. healthcare system.  When coronavirus subsides, the new normal will require far more healthcare workers and this Corps is an excellent way to facilitate this growth.

During non-pandemic times, Corps soldiers can supplement existing civilian and non-Corps military teams in emergencies in ways that do not lead to dependence or hamper their ability to be rapidly deployed for a pandemic.  And those with enough experience can help train relevant local and state personnel, too.  Teams of the Corps can also shadow other healthcare workers as well as relevant workers in other fields both in the U.S. and abroad to learn even more.  They can also significantly supplement U.S. foreign aid and assistance to organizations like the United Nations (including the WHO), NATO, and the African Union.  Such work will not only build goodwill among allies and friends, it will also help forge new relationships, improve America’s image abroad, and help America to gain valuable experience from medical and logistical situations that our personnel would not otherwise gain.  Such an approach was taken by the Obama Administration in sending teams from the Army and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)—a main agency of the Department of Health and Human Services, (HHS)—to West Africa to assist with fighting a major Ebola outbreak there, a rapid, proactive response that helped to prevent a much larger outbreak even as the deadly disease still ended up spreading to ten countries on three continents.

As Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky remarked in a mid-May op-ed extolling the value of international cooperation in the coronavirus era, “in early April, we sent some of our doctors to Italy.  Their work treating patients there has helped us to learn lessons about the spread of the disease that are now informing our own quarantine procedures and in turn, helping to save lives here.”  Just imagine if we had had thousands of members of the Corps ready to deploy in northern Italy when Lombardy was put on lockdown on March 8: not only could we have saved lives there, we would have learned valuable firsthand lessons and deepened our experience with COVID-19 before it slammed the U.S., saving American lives, too.  As it actually played out, Italy had to request assistance from the U.S. rather than the U.S. taking a leading, proactive role.

From such cooperation and experiences at home and abroad, members of the Corps can amass and pass on institutional knowledge that will enhance local, state, national, and international bodies of knowledge.  The Corps can play a leading global role in research, evaluation, and dissemination of findings as well as in running simulations with a variety of actors.  Medical “wargames” should be a major priority along with military wargames, and few institutions would be as well-suited for this as America’s new Army Pandemic Corps.

The Corps would also greatly facilitate civil-military cooperation. In non-pandemic times, the Corps could take input from various relevant bodies at all levels as part of the Army with the Army understanding that the Corp’s mission under Army control is primarily one of learning, bridging, and supplementation.  In times of military pressure, this ensures we have a significant boost to military medical and logistical operations, but, as in the Corps’s supplementary civilian-support operations, without creating dependency so that rapid deployment for pandemic operations is still possible without compromising normal military operations.

Writing for the U.S. Naval Institute, Commander of NATO’s Allied Joint Force Command Naples, Italy, U.S. Adm. James Foggo—who has been dealing with COVD-19 in Italy—calls germs the seventh domain of warfare.  In his piece, he notes that “logistics are the sixth domain of warfare, the Achilles heel of any military force.  When fighting pandemics, the logistical capabilities of the force are paramount.”  He also notes that “confronting a pandemic requires an all-hands approach—we must work with our interagency and host-nation partners to leverage mutual strengths to stem the spread of the virus, while offering our support to those in need. Yet we must be mindful of our operational readiness, retaining the ability to respond immediately if challenged in another domain of warfare.”  Some of his top takeaways from his experience as a commander in Italy facing coronavirus are that, to better face biothreats (including pandemics), we must protect our forces, ensure continuity of operations, build and preserve strong relationships with allies and partners, elevate experts, fuse with the other domains of warfare, prioritize humanitarian intervention early, and train and wargame for biothreats intensely and often.  The Army Pandemic Corps, as I have proposed it, would specifically and significantly advance all these priorities and more.

And yet, as Dr. Jacob Stoil and Army Maj. Bethany Landeck point out in an additional MWI article, it has been decades since the U.S. military included large-scale epidemic response in its operations, as was the case in major wars of the past.  Looking at the current state of the military in yet another MWI piece titled “The Military Is Not the Nation’s Emergency Room Doctor,” U.S. Air Force Center for Strategic Deterrence Studies Director Al Mauroni noted the military should be ready to support civilian efforts in a pandemic, but not to take them over.  The Corps will restore and elevate the past role discussed in the former and keep things in the spirit of the latter by keeping the military in a support role and civilians in the top leadership roles.  The Corps will also very much help advance needed reform within the military by addressing problems that the pandemic has exposed, shortcomings highlighted by Army Reserve Capt. James Long in still another MWI piece discussing “our lack of preparation, in the form of adaptive digital networks and robust connective tissue with civilian partners.”  While the civilian apparatuses have in many ways failed us during this pandemic and the military did not have a clear, robust role to play when it could have made a clear, robust difference, DPPR with a new Army Pandemic Corps at its heart addresses both of these crucial gaps.

II. CDC and FEMA Reorganization

The head of the CDC would simultaneously occupy a deputy secretary position within the DPPR that would function as the main liaison between HHS/CDC and DPPR, but in times of pandemics would, along with the CDC itself, report primarily to DPPR, switching formally from HHS to DPPR much like the general and his Pandemic Corps.  This would ensure that HHS and DPPR have strong coordination both before and during a pandemic and give the appropriate command and departmental emphasis when necessary.  DPPR would also have its own infectious disease intelligence desk, to coordinate with staff at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s National Center for Medical Intelligence (a small portion of whom would be transferred to DPPR’s desk upon its creation to jumpstart it), American medical infectious disease teams, the WHO, and global experts to track and identify pandemic threats.  In short, the CDC’s pandemic-related work would carry on as normal but with a boost and different reporting lines during a pandemic.

DDPR would also have lead jurisdiction when it came to related the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA, normally under DHS) operations for the duration of the pandemic.  However, unlike the CDC and Pandemic Corps, all of FEMA would not be part of the switch.  Like his CDC and Pandemic Corps counterparts, the FEMA Administrator would during non-pandemic times have a dual liaising role as a deputy secretary of DPPR, but he would stay reporting to DHS both then and during a pandemic.  The Secretary of DPPR during a pandemic would automatically be authorized to take all FEMA personnel working on pandemic operations, automatically being able to allocate a certain portion of all FEMA field personnel and the support staff for those field teams directly to his DPPR, with them reporting directly to his office.  Beyond that specified portion, if the DPPR secretary feels he will need more FEMA resources, that can be worked out by reaching agreement with the head of FEMA or, failing that, the president would mediate and decide.  This ensures that FEMA would have considerable capacity to deal with non-pandemic emergencies even during a pandemic, allowing flexibility and for staffing levels be based on the bigger picture, while still empowering DPPR to lead on pandemic matters.

III. Keeping DPPR from Being Politicized in a Hyperpartisan Era

U.S. Army Reserve Maj. Wonny Kim notes for MWI the failure of communications tactics and strategy, and, without a doubt, politicization of public statements on the pandemic at the highest levels of government—up to and including dangerous disinformation and misinformation on vital health information (and on things as simple as wearing a mask and social distancing)—is a regular feature of this failure in communication.  Thus, in order to prevent politicization of information related to pandemics and preparedness, DPPR must regularly brief—in times of pandemics and in non-pandemic times—not only the White House, but all major intelligence agency heads, top Cabinet officials,  as well as top relevant leadership of both parties in Congress, including of key committees, at regular intervals.  All governors of U.S. States and Territories and their attorneys general would also be briefed along with all nine Supreme Court Justices, the latter in case there would be legal challenges between the Executive and Legislative Branches over DPPR information dissemination, giving the Supreme Court the context to rule quickly on those disputes.  All non-sensitive information will be made publicly available and the DPPR secretary will also brief the media regularly.  If certain information is felt by the White House—specifically the president and a majority of the Principals Committee of the NSC—to need to be kept from the public and maintained as secret because of issues of national security and/or protecting intelligence gathering assets and methods, the highest congressional leadership from both parties must also be briefed in full on these issues of secrecy along with the nine Supreme Court Justices to, as stated before, provide the justices proper context should disputes arise.  Such disputes can be initiated by congressional leaders—the top leader of either party in either the House or Senate would be enough to trigger a formal challenge—and the Supreme Court would exclusively handle and fast-track these disputes to avoid delays during a pandemic.  In short, all three branches have potential major roles in deciding what information is kept from the public and lawmakers overall, helping to keep information from being used or withheld for partisan political purposes.

IV. DPPR: Improving Preparedness and Response at All Levels, Minimizing Politics

At the state and local levels, we have seen vast gulfs in competency from one state to another and within the federal government during this coronavirus response.  By having DPPR preplan and coordinate with Congress, other parts of the federal government, and with states and localities before the next pandemic, our entire society will better prepared.  This way, DPPR insulates the nation from poor leadership at multiple governmental levels.  Relieving governors and mayors of the need to do as much planning as we have seen them have to scramble do on their own (see Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan’s twenty-two-day odyssey to get coronavirus tests from South Korea and keep them from being confiscated by the Trump Administration) in favor of knowing they can tap into plans, logistics networks, and coordination already well-laid out in advance will then free up local leaders and resources to focus on aspects of disaster management more uniquely suited to their unique capabilities (e.g., supporting local officials, assuring the public), meaning the overall response on the levels most felt by actual citizens will be that much more effective.  And local staff will be better trained and prepared since DPPR personnel will be dedicated liaisons and trainers in non-pandemic times, with those relationships developed from all the DPPR’s non-pandemic period activities paying massive dividends on multiple levels.

Conclusion: A Bold, New Cabinet Department and a Bold Reorganization for an Existential Threat

In the end, DPPR represents what is ideal in times of dire threat: vast, temporarily, and transparently concentrated power allocated in a preplanned way with all relevant actors understanding their roles and responsibilities and having been included in the preplanning.  Ad hoc responses can be great, but they depend greatly on the quality of individual leaders and can fail just as often.  Leadership will always matter, but setting up the DPPR in the manner described above will not only limit the damage poor leadership can do by providing a clear institutional framework that can relieve top leadership of the need to be involved in so many details, it will allow top leaders to focus on calming the people of the nation, international coordination and outreach to other heads of state and major international bodies, and recovery and post-recovery planning while the actual day-to-day disaster management and logistics are left to the professionals best suited to handle them, operations we are seeing have been currently neglected and mismanaged at the top federal levels to disastrous effect.  Instead of arguing and debating different agency plans and different ideas and philosophies for crucial lower-level wonky decisions, instead of having to introduce personnel to each other and form working groups or task forces in an ad hoc manner, which, in this case, has produced confusion more than anything else and failed to deliver adequate results, we can have a clear, singular road map for general operations and overall approaches, a road map that minimizes infighting, confusion, uncertainty, and dependence on individual political leaders’ competence.

While there is certainly possibility for confusion and head-butting with this more complex structure and roles for the Army Pandemic Corps, the CDC, and FEMA, with proper leadership, better coordination and more effective, robust operations should result, especially compared to the current ad hoc, dysfunctional coronavirus response.  Even allowing for new potential issues, the net effect is of these overlapping relationships is still very likely to be forcing a greater level cooperation and coordination than currently exists, as DPPR and especially the Pentagon, CDC, and FEMA—but also HHS, DHS, and DOJ—would need to be intimate partners in planning and executing policy.  In essence, just as DHS became an umbrella agency that involved a reorganization of many agencies after 9/11, DPPR would function both as a permanent planning and coordination agency and specialized, temporary DHS for pandemics to be activated with a higher level of authority and responsibility, from planning and coordination in one state to execution in another.  If this sound superfluous, consider that the United Nations has a whole major office within its Secretariat—the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)—that focuses on running complex humanitarian efforts and maintains many relationships before and after such efforts rather than allow for an ad-hoc response for each humanitarian disaster.

In fact, history shows there is no major reason to ipso facto oppose complex or joint civil and military overlap or commands.  Going back to the ancient Roman Republic, one could argue that one of the main reasons Rome’s (surprisingly) democratic republic—upon which the American Founding Fathers based our own republic—was able to govern its expanding empire so successfully for so long before the rise of the autocratic emperors was its ability to both divide and expand creatively both the wielding and implementation of executive authority (imperium) within its flexible yet strong constitutional framework, especially in its combination of civil and military authority abroad in ways that helped avoid conflict between the two without overwhelming any one officer-holder or office.  Here we would think less of the of rarely utilized office of dictator for the most extreme of emergencies, which essentially suspended the normal constitutional order and invested overwhelming power in one man, and more of the special office of proconsul (pro consule), a special version of the authority of the annually elected top normal office-holders (a pair of consuls, on which the American presidency is based).  Proconsuls could still be given extraordinary powers but over a limited sphere of affairs and for a limited time.  Thus far avoiding the eventual giant excesses of imperium that helped bring down ancient Rome’s republic, America has attempted something in this Roman tradition on notable occasions.  At the dawn of the twentieth century, we have (then-future President and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) William Howard Taft as a civilian governor being given proconsularesque authority by President William McKinley over U.S. civil and military authorities in the newly acquired Philippines after the Spanish-American War.  Yet a certain vagueness, political disputes, McKinley’s assassination, his successor Theodore Roosevelt’s reluctance to be involved, and U.S. military commanders’ resistance to civil control of the military outside the president exercising it himself (and even then…) meant the actual application of this idea was limited, but when it was, the largely benevolent Taft mostly improved the situation in the Philippines in spite of military leaders’ sometimes-tendency to make things worse with harsh overzealousness there.  Other notable American pronconsular moments include Reconstruction after the Civil War and Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Japan after World War II, but there are numerous examples of American variations on the Roman proconsular model over many years up through our recent overseas wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and even Gen. Honoré in New Orleans after Katrina (plus, America is hardly alone in utilizing this model).  Examples of different types of American civil-military overlaps involve the U.S. Army’s Civil Affairs branch (including its soldiers serving as advisors for United Nations and NATO missions) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which from some of the earliest days of United States history through the present has been and is still massively engaged in civilian projects affecting large portions of the American population.

So the idea of temporarily having a military corps under civilian control should not be thought of as too revolutionary: after all, all American military forces serve under the civilian U.S. President, civilian Secretary of Defense, and some other combination of civilian (deputy) secretaries overseeing the various branches of the armed forces, a principle of civilian control enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.  Also enshrined in the document is the idea of temporary measures to meet extraordinary challenges, such as the suspension of habeas corpus in Article I Section 9, and plenty of modern-era laws have allowed for temporary unorthodox measures, from the 1950 Defense Production Act to far more typical presidential– and state-level disaster declarations, which have seen unprecedented application during this coronavirus pandemic but which are already largely being lifted (though the lifting seems frighteningly premature).

But moving in this general direction of more concentrated civilian authority over biodefense is what some of the most notable experts have already articulated.  A major working group meeting on biodefense that convened in 2014-2015—one that involved many senior former and current government officials from both major political parties as well as numerous experts in various fields—produced a landmark report late in 2015, A National Blueprint for Biodefense: Leadership and Major Reform Needed to Optimize Efforts, and among its top recommendations was to institutionalize, centralize, and prioritize biodefense at the very highest levels of government.  The creation of DPPR as a Cabinet-level agency does just that.

While DPPR’s creation along the lines described would certainly be a shakeup of the existing order and way of doing things, as Army Lt. Col. ML Cavanaugh notes in his MWI piece on coronavirus-era military strategy:

Organizations are loath to try new things, take on new projects, and risk new avenues of approach.  Only when real-world crises confront us do we really and ruthlessly set priorities and change our behavior accordingly.  This is rare.  Very rare.

COVID-19 is already permitting ideas to go forth that might have seemed absurd just months ago.  This is how the unthinkable gives birth to the impossible.

King Abdullah II of Jordan expressed similar sentiment in a late-April op-ed, that

the moments of unity inspired by [major global] events—and the financial crises and natural disasters we’ve also faced over the years—have never lasted long enough to push us to fundamentally rethink the systems we have in place. More often than not, our responses have done little more than plug holes, falling far short of what could be achieved with modern technology.

…Many are optimistic we will simply rebuild after this pandemic. But rebuilding is not enough. We should focus instead on creating something new, something better.

…That means recalibrating our world and its systems.

He could not be more right.  And since his government in Jordan has swiftly enacted far more successful and competent national coronavirus measures than we did (and far earlier)—including robust targeted and random testing—perhaps we should heed his advice even more so.

In the end, we can and should be better prepared for the next pandemic, and there will be one.  Whether or not we will adapt, there is a good chance our enemies will, with the COVID-19 devastation serving as a kind of inspiration we wish did not exist, nor occur to the human mind.  Let our minds take truly inspiring direction from this crisis, inspiration that accepts major and creative top-level reform as urgent and necessary.

Whether coming from nature herself, a foreign enemy government, or terrorists, the next bioassault as powerful as or even worse than the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic will take a nontraditional, unconventional reform of our national biodefense structures and approaches in order for us to be properly prepared to face it.  This Cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response exponentially improves the odds that we will be, regardless of who is in the White House.

© 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.

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

• 1-A Brief, Non-Comprehensive Survey of Bioweapons, Biowarfare, and Bioterrorism History in Light of the Coronavirus Pandemic
• 2-America’s History of Failure in Unconventional and Asymmetric Warfare Is Instructive for Our War with the Coronavirus
• 3-Why the Coronavirus Pandemic and America’s Disastrous Response Will Inspire Future Use of Bioweapons
• 4-The Harsh Truths Coronavirus Has Exposed
• See also my proposal for a cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response (DPPR)

We will never find an explanation…for the evils done by people against other people, or for the love that drove the doctors to bring smallpox to an end.  Yet after all they had done, we still held smallpox in our hands, with a grip of death that would never let it go.  All I knew was that the dream of total eradication had failed.  The virus’s last strategy for survival was to bewitch its host and become a source of power.  We could eradicate smallpox from nature, but we could not uproot the virus from the human heart.

—Richard Preston (author of The Hot Zone), The Demon in the Freezer (2002)

Eradication

It was one of the most inspiring moments of the entire Cold War.

In what has been acknowledged by many to be “the single most important triumph of public health in human history,” on December 9, 1979, the WHO certified smallpox eradicated from nature, and, to much fanfare at the May, 1980 session of the World Health Assembly (the WHO’s governing body) formally celebrated this achievement publicly with a unified declaration acknowledging the singular triumph.  The disease—terrorizing humanity for thousands of years and responsible for more deaths than any single other disease—may have wiped out 300-500 million people in the twentieth century alone, but now, no more.

This triumph was the culmination of two decades of effort from the global healthcare community led by the WHO, first with an effort inspired and proposed by a top Soviet scientist in 1959 that fell far short, with many very skeptical that any disease could be “eradicated,” so support for the effort was lukewarm and halfhearted.  Still, the effort did drastically reduce infection and mortality of the disease.  Some did not give up on the dream of total eradication, though.  A second effort picked up where the first faltered, with the Intensified Smallpox Eradication Program beginning in 1967, a year in which some two million died from the disease out of 10-15 million cases (rapid vaccination saved many infected before symptoms worsened, reducing the death rate, and these figures were down from some 50 million cases annually in the 1950s).

For the next decade, doctors and medical staff scoured the globe—braving even natural disasters and civil wars—to find all cases of smallpox and then ring-vaccinate everyone around the cases, much like cutting down trees in a forest on fire to stop the spread of the fire.  The technique worked extremely well, and the last recorded case of naturally-occurring smallpox in world history was in 1977 in Somalia.  The following year, another person died because of a mishap at a university lab that was studying smallpox.  Efforts were kept up to keep the virus from making a comeback, and they were successful: by the end of 1979, the virus was certified to be extinct from nature—the first and last disease thus far to suffer that fate—and there has not been a known case since.

In the words of Richard Preston (author of the famous 1990s bestselling seminal book The Hot Zone that awoke the national consciousness of America to the threat of emerging infectious diseases), those carrying out the campaign

had forged themselves into an army of peace.  With a weapon in their hands, a needle with two points, they had searched the corners of the earth for the virus, opening every door and lifting every scrap of cloth.  They would not rest, they would not stand aside, and they gave all they had until variola [i.e., smallpox] was gone.  No greater deed was ever done in medicine, and no better thing ever came from the human spirit.

At the height of the Cold War, the two rivals tearing the world apart—the United States and the Soviet Union—came together to lead one of the great services for humanity that history has ever known.  Two bitter foes that were constantly threatening each other with nuclear annihilation proved that, even amid the greatest of disputes and tensions, enemies could still work together to make the word a better place, to save lives and put their common interest and those of humanity as a whole ahead of their differences.  There are few examples in history of anything like this, and nothing that matches the amount of lives saved by this common effort during a global geopolitical conflict between the two lead actors.

Eventually, smallpox would only be only officially preserved in two facilities: America’s CDC in Atlanta and Russia’s Vector Institute (the Russian State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology VECTOR that was a major facility of the Soviet biowarfare program known, as I have discussed elsewhere, as Biopreparat) in Koltsovo, Russia, the top government disease research facilities in America and Russia, respectively.

By the time Preston would write his 2002 book on smallpox, The Demon in the Freezer, the then-top scientist at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USARMRIID, at Fort Detrick, Maryland, where the U.S. earlier had located a big chunk of its now-defunct biowarfare program), Dr. Peter Jahrling (played by Topher Grace in last year’s NetGeo miniseries, The Hot Zone, based on Preston’s other aforementioned book), would frequently quip:  “If you believe smallpox is sitting in only two freezers, I have a bridge for you to buy. The genie is out of the lamp.” 

Weaponization

As I pointed out in my earlier-referenced related piece, since the Eradication and at the end of the Cold War, because of high-level defectors from Biopreparat, the world learned that the Soviet Union even at the height of the Eradication had a massive biowarfare program that included smallpox, and the Soviets were not the only ones pursuing bioweapons and smallpox stocks, also as discussed in that earlier article.  Additionally, it became clear that the Soviets were working with smallpox outside the designated Vector Institute.

At the same time, with the increasing concerns about global warming in the 1990s, we get into the possibility of smallpox in the bodies of long-dead victims frozen in the now melting tundra permafrost, smallpox that could be unleashed and infect yet again from nature.

But the main concern is not the tundra smallpox.

Now we see how the Soviets got their lamp and genie.

We learned from the highest-level Biopreparat defector (Col. Kanatjan Alibekov, now “Ken Alibek”) that when there were raging epidemics of smallpox in India during the Eradication in the 1960s, the Soviets had a medical team operating there in 1967, helping to push back the spread of the disease there, and that team was accompanied by agents of the K.G.B., the Soviets’ notorious intelligence and security service.  They were on a mission to find a particularly nasty strain of smallpox, which they did in 1967, bringing the super-sub-strain—known as India-1 or India-1967—back to the Soviet Union with them.  This sub-strain was a far more virulent and stable sub-strain than other strains of variola major (already the far deadlier of two main smallpox strains, the weaker one being variola minor) and one that has a far shorter incubation period and was harder to diagnose, making it ideal for bioweapons relative to existing variola major stockpiles the Soviets had at the time.  Within a few years, India-1 was their flagship strain for smallpox bioweapons, with twenty tons of it being produced every year to keep it as fresh and deadly as possible. 

The K.G.B had used the well-intentioned Eradication program as a cover to find the raw materials for a nightmare bioweapon, and it succeeded in keeping this secret from the West for two decades, during which it carried out intense research, development, and testing with the sub-strain.

We should still be thankful for the visionaries and dedicated health professionals from the Soviet Union who helped make Eradication a reality, and for the Soviet Government’s generous donations of enormous amounts of smallpox vaccine to fuel the effort.  The sincerity of these health workers should not be questioned. 

However, as is so often in the world, even where there are good actors and motives, there can be bad ones right alongside them, and this was the case with the Soviet Eradication effort.  As Preston notes:

We will never find an explanation…for the evils done by people against other people, or for the love that drove the doctors to bring smallpox to an end.  Yet after all they had done, we still held smallpox in our hands, with a grip of death that would never let it go.  All I knew was that the dream of total eradication had failed.  The virus’s last strategy for survival was to bewitch its host and become a source of power.  We could eradicate smallpox from nature, but we could not uproot the virus from the human heart.

2020: A Year of Threat Convergences

If we jump forward to Italy now during its terrible coronavirus outbreak, we may be seeing a repeat of history.

As noted earlier, Italy was requesting U.S. assistance from our troops stationed there since World War II because we had not been proactive in offering help to our beleaguered NATO ally.  But President Vladimir Putin of Russia beat us to the punch, embarrassingly preempting significant U.S. military aid by nearly a month and one-upping us in a public relations nightmare by sending a military medical aid convoy to Italy, to much Russian fanfare and broadcast constantly with gusto by Russian media to the rest of the world.  The mission was dubbed “From Russia with Love” (sharing a title with one of the most famous James Bond films and novels) with that phrase written in Italian on a graphic of two hearts—one colored in the colors Russia’s flag, one in Italy’s—placed on the Russian military vehicles delivering the aid.  “From Russia with Love” was also, tellingly, written on the graphic in English above the Italian even though the aid was being delivered to Italy.  In the wider context of the geopolitical tug-of-war for Europe between Russia and the U.S., Russia scored another win, again beating the U.S. in a form of unconventional, asymmetric warfare.

But not all was as advertised.

The highly respected Italian daily La Stampa—one of Italy’s oldest newspapers—did some digging, and found that, according to anonymous Italian government officials, the aid Russia sent was not particularly helpful and the whole effort was more about public-relations and an effort to undermine NATO, with one official saying that “Eighty percent of Russian supplies are totally useless or of little use to Italy” and two Italian military officials echoing that sentiment. 

Unsurprisingly, the Russian Defence Ministry directly attacked and seemed to threaten La Stampa and the journalist behind the story, Jacopo Iacoboni, calling his story “fake news,” making sure to post the smear in English.  Even in this delicate situation, the Italian Defense and Foreign Affairs Ministries, while thanking Russia for its aid, condemned the Russian Defence Ministry’s attacks on the Italian free press.  The mission is now winding down, seemingly not having been very effective.

The disinformational, propagandistic aspects of the whole operation only became more evident when Italy revealed that it had received only 150 ventilators from Russia (not the 600 the Russian Ambassador to Italy claimed) and mysterious WhatsApp groups surfaced offering 200 euros to Italians to make and post videos praising the Russian “aid” effort on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (less but still some money for posts with just text).

Along with the aid, Russia sent over 120 of its top officers from one of Russia’s main Radiological, Chemical and Biological Weapons Defense (RChBD) military units.  If one buys Russia’s stated aim for this outing, it is somewhat strange that it sent biowarfare specialists to Italy, which is supposed to have some of the best personnel, equipment, and expertise in when it comes to nuclear, biological, and chemical unit capacities.  The unit is also suspiciously being led in Gen. Sergey Kikot, the number-two commander of all of Russia’s RChBD forces.

Gen. Kikot is perhaps most famous internationally for being one of Russia’s most prominent disinformationists and apologists for Assad’s regime as part of Russia’s overall Syria disinformation operations and support for Assad, with Kikot issuing strong denials that Assad used chemical weapons against his own people and claiming that the White Helmets—the brave Syrian civilian volunteers who try to save other civilians in the immediate aftermath of Syrian regime and Russian military attacks—were staging fake footage of such attacks, absurd statements which have gone against the findings of NATO allies, experts, human rights groups, and watchdogs, including the United Nations-associated Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the chief international chemical weapons inspections authority.

It would be unthinkable in this kind of a situation for there not to be intelligence officers from Russia’s military intelligence branch, the G.R.U., embedded within Russia’s unit in Italy.  In this case, being deployed in a NATO country during a pandemic is an invaluable opportunity for intelligence collection and even for intelligence operations. 

But it is also worth noting that the G.R.U. is often the tip of Putin’s spear in both the Kremlin’s conventional and unconventional operations.  The G.R.U. has been active on the ground in Russia’s invasion, occupation, and illegal annexation of Crimea and its support for rebels in Eastern Ukraine.  It also has had its commandos—Russia’s elite Spetsnaz special forces—play important roles on the battlefield in Syria, including in Aleppo and Palmyra; it was even overseeing the Russian mercenaries who attacked a joint U.S.-S.D.F. position in Syria in February, 2018.  Furthermore, the G.R.U. has been one of Putin’s point organizations in his war on Western democracy, engaging in cyberwarfare, destabilization, and disinformation efforts against NATO countries in Europe and other U.S. allies, in addition to its infamous efforts against the U.S. during the 2016 election (what I have called the First Russo-American Cyberwar). 

But when thinking about why elite Russian biowarfare specialists and G.R.U. intelligence operatives would be in Italy, we should perhaps think less about 2016 and more about 1967, when the K.G.B. accompanied medical teams to India during the Smallpox Eradication Program.

The G.R.U. is one of the successor agencies to the K.G.B.

It is uncertain what all the precise activity the Russian biowarfare units and any G.R.U. operatives in Italy have been up to, but this scenario seems awfully familiar.  Whatever their purpose, this whole episode should serve as a reminder of the ability of the Russians to see unconventional opportunities in all situations, including public health crises, and to reinforce how unprepared we are in general to stand up to such efforts.  Years from now, we hopefully will not be caught off guard if we discover the Russians have engineered some sort of supercoronavirus, nor, on a far simpler level, allow Russia or another rival to upstage our efforts to assist our allies and friends abroad during a pandemic.

We also must hope that we are better prepared here at home in a far deeper sense than adding to and reorganizing our federal government’s organizational chart.  My soon-to-be-released proposal for a cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response would be a major leap forward in a big-picture national policy sense, but there is so much more that needs to be done throughout our society.  For it was not just our government that failed us, but different aspects of our media, our business sector, our religious institutions across faiths, celebrities and various other elites, plenty of rank-and-file Americans along with them, our very culture itself.  And it is the societal failings that are embedded deep in our society that have not only been major factors in making our response to COVID-19 so shockingly poor, but have also have contributed significantly to many of our failures in unconventional, asymmetric warfare over decades.  It is those societal failings that were so brilliantly exploited by Russia in 2016, too, but Russia has also used our weaknesses to help amplify and perpetuate our failing coronavirus response, finding plenty of existing conspiracy theories, mistrust, and hate in America to amplify and plenty of Americans willing to believe and peddle Russia’s own false narratives, whether in 2016 or today in our current coronavirus climate.

In other words, at each step of the way, millions of Americans were gleefully along for the ride, the very definitions of useful idiots, taking Russia’s disinformation and making it their misinformation.  That is happening even now, in our 2020 election.

Putin is himself former K.G.B., and part of his genius is that he and his intelligence-crowd’s longstanding K.G.B.-inspired techniques accurately assessed our domestic weaknesses, figuring out how to magnify many of them with their own operations in a variety of settings, from elections to pandemics: they look for anything and anyone that will help divide America and make us weaker, with this pandemic just being a “gift” of an opportunity for the Kremlin.

America certainly had its own strains of ignorance without any Russian meddling (to quote the great J. G. A. Pocock, “it is notorious that American culture is haunted by myths, many of which arise out of the attempt to escape history and then regenerate it”), but Russian disinformation and cyberwarfare thrives on this ignorance.  As part of Moscow’s campaign to knowingly falsely blame the U.S. for a multitude of things—from the downing of civilian airliner MH17 (shot down over Ukraine in 2014 by a Russian missile given by Russia to pro-Russian Ukrainian separatists_ to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the then-Soviet Union—Russia is now blaming the U.S. for engineering the coronavirus as a bioweapon (or sometimes 5G is to blame; yeah, the Russians are a huge part of that, too).  This follows similar efforts to blame the U.S. for spreading Ebola, HIV/AIDS, even swine flu.  The Kremlin has also been boosting America’s dangerous anti-vaxxer movement.  Overall, when it comes to health, Russia has engaged in campaigns to stoke Americans’ fears of diseases, make us more susceptible to disease, and weaken our overall trust in U.S. healthcare and medical expertise, trust that is essential for any kind of response to a public health crisis in a democracy to be effective.

The same organs of disinformation behind Russia’s “firehose of falsehood” (to quote a RAND report) for all recent disinformation campaigns are being utilized in this latest coronavirus campaign, and, like the other campaigns, it is achieving results: a recent Pew study showed that close to a third of Americans believe in the totally unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that coronavirus was man-made in some sort of lab and is not natural, with one quarter saying they are not sure either way.  To be fair, top elements of the Trump Administration are pushing an unfounded conspiracy theory that the new coronavirus was created in a Chinese lab in Wuhan, where the outbreak originated, and China has been joining Russia in promoting the idea that the U.S. is behind the virus.  While the survey does not specify where the virus originated or who was behind it, the right-wing in America has been pushing the Chinese lab theory and, as I have noted elsewhere, anti-Semitic explanations and sentiments regarding the virus.  The Chinese lab theory is now favored by the president himself, along with Sec. of State Mike Pompeo and top Trump trade and China advisor Peter Navarro.  Apart from numerous and varied other widespread disinformation campaigns and misinformation vectors, very active and present Russian disinformation still makes up an important portion of the overall disinformation being bandied about, contributing to an overall atmosphere of conspiracy, distrust, confusion, fear, and just plain bad information, casting doubt and adding more non-reality based noise to the conversation, so regardless of whether Americans—who are being widely exposed to these conspiracy theories—are convinced by Russian propaganda or not that the U.S. that “created” the virus, the Russian efforts still contribute substantially to a deteriorating informational climate.  Specifically, these efforts further feed an atmosphere suggesting specifically that coronavirus was created in a lab somewhere while generally helping to saturate that atmosphere with bad information, muddying the waters and obfuscating the truth for many Americans.   It certainly does not help that the top current U.S. political leaders and many lower-level politicians in addition to media outlets in the country are embracing similar false theories even if the culprits “making” the virus vary.  And three other factors serve as additional amplifiers poisoning the atmosphere here: that Americans are increasingly subscribing to fantastical conspiracy theories in general, that conspiracy theories are more attractive and powerful in times of crisis, and that studies confirm a large portion of Americans are simply bad at discerning fact from fiction and are easily confused.

These dynamics are as good as any at illustrating how Russian efforts and homegrown efforts and attitudes play together like a symphony orchestra performance conducted by Putin to play to his ends.  The last concert he conducted, with his Kremlin Symphony Orchestra performing original Putin works, did not go very well for us, and this new one could very well be worse.

In the midst of Russia’s coronavirus disinformation and 2020 election interference efforts targeting the U.S., as another example of both ends feeding into Russian interests, the Trump Administration allowed Russia—even as a hostile actor—to deliver coronavirus aid to us on American soil in a publicized way, a shocking yet par-for-the-course act for the current administration. 

And so Russia keeps up its public relations stunts and disinformation, hoping to deflect attention from incriminating events at home as coronavirus infections soar to make Russia alternate with Brazil as the third and second-most infected country in the world even by the official numbers, with the reality being that there are virtually certainly government efforts to suppress a far grimmer actual toll (some medical staff are reportedly being instructed not to record coronavirus deaths as caused by coronavirus).  There have even been three Russian medical professionals questioning or distraught by Russia’s coronavirus response who “fell” out of windows in just two weeks, two dying and one critically injured; such “accidents” or worse tend to befall a wide variety or whistleblowers, journalists, critics of the Putin, and others Putin wants to make disappear.

What will not disappear are the threats posed by Russian disinformation, cyberwarfare, election interference, and the Kremlin’s undisclosed biowarfare program.

Unless the U.S. has since obtained direct and continued intelligence on the exact nature of the genetically engineered strains and man-made Frankenstein viruses described by top defectors—highly unlikely—it is almost certain that the U.S. would be defenseless against such bioagents deliberately designed to overcome existing vaccines, medicine, and treatment.  Looking at how much coronavirus has crippled the U.S., if America was not able to work on specific remedies designed to counter these Russian superagents by directly studying them over time directly and rigorously testing biodefense measures—new vaccines, medicine—against these new agents, it would be impossible for us to come up with anything that could effectively protect Americans from them, let alone have the remedies mass-manufactured and ready for distribution and safe usage.  A first strike with such weapons would likely be the only strike necessary to incapacitate most of America’s defenses and to destroy America as we know it.  As discussed, apocalyptic-minded bioterrorists would be more likely to use a nightmare bioweapon.  Yet however unlikely such a strike from a state like Russia would be, being ill-prepared will only increase that likelihood.

The current international Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) treaty prohibiting offensive bioweapons and related research—to which Russia is a signatory—is a legal one, but without any verification or control mechanisms.  We must absolutely have a more forceful international bioweapons inspections system and use all peaceful means to force Russia into compliance.  Ideally, this would be through the United Nations, except Russia will clearly veto such binding frameworks and resolutions, or, even if it did not, would surely veto any Security Council efforts to specifically hold Russia to account or to submit to and/or comply with robust inspections.  It will instead fall on the U.S., Canada, the EU, Japan, and other allied and like-minded nations to collectively impose their own sanctions on Russia to force compliance or demonstrate a stiff economic price for non-compliance, much like was the case after Russia’s invasions of Ukraine’s eastern and Crimean regions.  Setting an example with Russia would set a proper tone for the unfolding century, and other rogue states would also see the costs of pursuing bioweapons and be more inclined to play by the rules if Russia is brought to heel.  And each state that is brought to heel can be part of a mandatory coalition to combat bioterrorism as part of their respective arrangements, with the BWC being rewritten to include robust counterbioterrorism provisions and severe penalties for supporting or failing to act against bioterrorism or for failing to properly secure sensitive materials involving deadly disease research.

A Collective Responsibility to Do Better

The actions suggested just above constitute dealing with unconventional, asymmetric warfare at the highest levels.

But the lowest levels are just as important.

We must also deal with our societal ills that make us so susceptible to disinformation, Russian or otherwise.  To a significant degree, preparing for unconventional, asymmetric information warfare and cyberwarfare also prepares us for pandemics, biowarfare, and bioterrorism: at the core of each is a willingness to defer to experts and to cultivate our minds to be able to properly vet what is coming from a position of factual vetting and properly understanding who and what is targeting us to take advantage of our weaknesses, biases, and predispositions.  Leaving our minds susceptible to disinformation and misinformation—whether it is about our elections and candidates or our public health system and information on a deadly disease—is like allowing our computer networks to go without security software, allowing our enemies to manipulate us and take advantage of our weaknesses to weaken our nation.  Thus, whether dealing with coronavirus, bioweapons, or Russian disinformation, taking concrete steps to tackle one will often pay off in our fight against the others.  And we have little reason to doubt that Russia will integrate coronavirus into its ambitious 2020 election interference—or, more aptly termed, Second Russo-American Cyberwar—or doubt that Russia is looking at and developing ways to turn coronavirus into a bioweapon as it did with smallpox and so many other bioagents in the past. 

Hence, biosecurity, disinformation security, and election security come together as part of the larger unconventional, asymmetric landscape.

In her conclusion to her must-read article “Disinformation, Democracy, and the Rule of Law,” former FBI counterintelligence agent and current Yale University senior lecturer on national security Asha Rangappa notes the complex, multidimensional aspects of Russia’s unconventional, asymmetric warfare against the United States:

Much of the public discussion on Russia’s disinformation operations in the U.S. has focused on their impact on the 2016 election and how they might affect elections in the future.  But the damage that Russia seeks to inflict through its disinformation campaign isn’t limited to electoral contests.  Rather, its long-term strategy has been to erode faith in the primary pillars upon which our democracy is based—including the rule of law and the institutions that support it.  So far, Russia’s efforts are yielding fruit, and technological and legislative fixes alone will be insufficient to counter them.  Defending against Russian disinformation in the long term will require a strategy to fortify America’s social fabric with an understanding of shared civic values that can serve as a prophylactic against Russia’s future attacks. 

She makes it all too clear that the government alone cannot save us from the manipulations of Russia’s disinformation and other techniques of division:

The framing of the Russian disinformation threat as a cybersecurity issue makes it tempting to look to the government, or to social media companies, to fix the problem. Regulatory and technological solutions are needed, and may well make it harder for Russia to employ the kinds of information warfare that it used in 2016.  But they will not address the fundamental vulnerability which Russia successfully exploited, which is the increasing social and political fissures in society and the resulting erosion of social trust in the U.S. over the past decades.

As a solution, Rangappa exhorts us to shore up the American weaknesses Russia exploits with a rebirth and renewal of citizenship, community, and civic life:

A model to rebuild social capital in America—and strengthen social trust—can feel unsatisfying, since it is intangible, difficult to measure, and disperses responsibility on us, as citizens.  At the same time, however, it can be empowering, as it offers a way for Americans to take ownership of a large part of the solution.  Russia’s attack on our democracy is an invitation for us to examine our relationship with fellow citizens, and how technology has affected the way we engage with them online and in real life.  By reclaiming democratic values that transcend political differences, and leveraging the most effective vehicles we have to disseminate them (including social media!), the U.S. can generate an immunity to Russia’s destabilization efforts which will endure over the long term.

In the syllabus for one of her classes that is very much an extension of her essay, Professor Rangappa provides a road map for the way forward with a robust list of materials, including:

1. Orwell’s legendary 1984 (to help bolster our defenses against not only totalitarianism and groupthink but also Orwellian disinformation and the manipulation of language so endemic in its use by troublemakers both at home and abroad)
2. The singular de Tocqueville’s ever-relevant, ever-insightful, ever-enduring Democracy in America (to understand our unique historical strengths and weaknesses and how they have factored into our democracy)
3. Amu Chua’s Political Tribes, an account of American tribalism (a force that we must understand and fight against more effectively, as it is tearing our country apart)
4. Robert Putnam’s seminal Bowling Alone (to understand how important social capital and civic engagement are in creating and maintaining a strong society)
5. The documentary Active Measures (to properly understand the methods by which Putin is attacking and harming our democracy)
6. Schoolhouse Rock (the episodes on American government and history, to show how learning about civics can be fun and also appeal to young Americans)

Professor Rangappa’s cocktail of learning is a foundation for a national societal strategy:

1. Understand how anti-democratic forces work to distort reality and language, along with rewriting history, in a war on reality we have to win
2. Know ourselves from an objective perspective (the good, the bad, and the ugly)
3. Understand how corrosive our own tribalism in America is and how we can fight it even before taking into account foreign efforts to exploit it
4. Gain a newfound appreciation for social capital and civic engagement so that we can restructure society to prioritize these vital pillars of healthy democracy
5. Know our chief foreign enemy, Vladimir Putin, and his methods, as well as how and why he has been successful in damaging America
6. Remember how important it is to start with civics and understanding our history and system overall and at a young age so that we may revive our moribund civics curricula for all American students going forward

Ultimately, such a strategy and priority-resetting will help us revive and further realize our Founding Fathers’ vision for America.

Virtue, then, along with biodefense and information warfare, is also a national security issue.

If you are rolling your eyes a bit with the serious suggestion that “we as individuals must be better and do more,” know that this consideration of virtue was of primary concern to the Founding Fathers and many great men before and after them.  They might not have used the term “national security” the way we do and I just did, but it was still a primary national security issue for our Founders nonetheless.

Few have articulated this sentiment as well and with such authority, and perhaps none better, then James Madison himself—eventual fourth president and architect and overall author of the U.S. Constitution—when he was making the case to the public in 1788, in writing and anonymously, for the adoption of that Constitution in The Federalist, in “No. 55,” to be exact:

As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.  Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.  Were the pictures which have been drawn by the political jealousy of some among us faithful likenesses of the human character, the inference would be, that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.

In other words, “We the People” must be worthy enough as a people—enough of us individually so that it is true in a collective sense—or this whole democracy thing is not going to work out so well.

Yes, in the short term, we must act boldly at the highest levels of our government and international bodies to prepare for the next pandemic and our first major bioawarfare or bioterrorist attack.  But in the long-run, we must fix our ailing society which produced such an unconscionable, unforgivable response to the novel coronavirus in the first place.  And as ambitious as my soon-to-be-unveiled cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response proposal will be demonstrated to be in relation to the first goal, it will be that second task that will be the far more challenging one.

Cassandra: Even then I told my people all the grief to come…

Aieeeee! —
the pain, the terror! the birth-pang of the seer 
who tells the truth — 
                                     it whirls me, oh, 
the storm comes again, the crashing chords!…

Leader[/Chorus]: Poor creature, you 
and the end you see so clearly. I pity you.

—Agamemnon, 1216-1344, by Aeschylus (458 BCE), Robert Fagles translation

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

See Brian’s full coronavirus coverage here and his latest eBook version of the full special report,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.

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Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse November 6, 2018

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981), November 6th, 2018

AMMAN — With the unprecedented publication by The New York Times of an anonymous op-ed by “a senior official in the Trump Administration” hot on the heels of the release of preview excerpts from legendary journalist Bob Woodward’s upcoming damning exposé on the Trump White House—both showing that top Trump officials are deliberately undermining and ignoring him for, in their view, the good of the nation—something is clear that is not being acknowledged yet, even two months after these events, in the major coverage of these unfolding developments:

The presidency of the United States of America is, and has been pretty much since the beginning of the Trump Administration, operating extraconstitutionally, that is, outside the bounds of the U.S. Constitution. In American history—in the modern era, anyway—the only times we have been in waters this uncharted and this dangerous from a constitutional perspective were the final year-and-a-half of the Woodrow Wilson Administration from 1919-1921 and the very last days of the Richard Nixon Administration in 1974.

In the first instance, after Wilson became essentially medically incapacitated later in 1919, his wife basically secretly took on his duties as president behind the scenes. As Joel Goldstein noted in 2014 in the scholarly journal Politics and the Life Sciences, while “[t]he length of Wilson’s disability has been debated,” he quoted an assessment by historian John Blum that seemed to be broad enough to reflect much of the range of opinion: “for a month the United States had no President; for many months the country had only a shell of a President.”

In the words of Goldstein, the situation clearly demonstrated that in terms of presidential succession under certain conditions, “the Constitution was ambiguous in…numerous material ways.”

Decades later, looking back at this situation was a significant inspiration for the adoption of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, providing a path to transfer presidential authority away from a president who is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” as well as to transfer (vice) presidential authority under other circumstances.

In the second instance, as the curtain was coming down on Nixon’s presidency in the face of coming impeachment amid the Watergate scandal, and even while Nixon was still legally the president, senior officials were prepared to ignore and defy him and did so. The crisis that forced Nixon to resign was largely a result of reporting by the duo of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, in large part armed with information from an anonymous senior Nixon Administration official known then as Deep Throat and later revealed to be Mark Felt, then-Associate Director at the FBI, not unlike some of the officials working against Trump today, actions also revealed by Woodward.

*****

A major reason the Twenty-fifth Amendment was adopted was to make sure a clear Constitutional order would continue even in certain rare and/or extreme circumstances.

The Roman Republic had a rarely-held office called the dictator that was only appointed in emergencies and only to fulfill specific mandates and/or last for a specific period of time and generally no longer than six months. It was essentially a way to temporarily put aside the Roman Republic’s normal working order while still preserving the Republic’s overall constitution, allowing both the law to be preserved during emergencies and regular order to be restored after them, with both happening under the same constitution. Marc de Wilde, writing for the journal History of Political Thought, noted that this system worked quite well for some three centuries as, in his view, during that period, “the dictatorship was never abused and turned against the constitution” (though, after a long hiatus, the rare later iterations proved far more problematic).

But the U.S. Constitution does not have the same flexibility. And what is happening now places the current U.S. government outside of the prescribed range of the functioning Constitution.

With the recent revelations, some have called the moves against Trump by his own people a kind of coup (including Woodward); in fact, it is impossible to argue that this is anything but that: the president leads the Executive Branch and is the Commander in Chief, and while, as I noted over a year ago, the system was designed by the Founding Fathers to empower officials under the president to defy him if he was violating the Constitution or the law, if the president gives an order that is not such a violation and he is still defied, the we are operating outside the legal bounds of the U.S. Constitution. While Trump is not medically and physically incapacitated like Wilson was for over a year-and-a-half, the nation is essentially being governed throughout Trump’s presidency like it was, briefly, in the final days of Nixon’s presidency, with senior officials under the president deeming him unstable and unfit to govern and that it may be and was necessary to defy and ignore him.

But the temporary state in which the Constitution was essentially illegally but practically put aside for a few days in 1974—a bad, and scary, enough, state of affairs then—it is terrifying for the health of the nation, the power of the Constitution, the world standing of America, and the staying power of democracy worldwide that the Constitution of the world’s oldest continuous democracy has essentially been put aside for coming up on two years since the beginning of Trump’s presidency because not just so-called “deep state” career bureaucrats, but even the president’s own most senior appointed officials chosen by him and his inner circle (including the author of the Times op-ed) deem him to be a madman unfit and unable to govern, and that it is necessary for the good of the country that they work to usurp his authority, lest he abuse it in such a gross way as to do serious damage to the country. 

Whether ignoring more extreme orders or swiping papers off the president’s desk to prevent his official signature from enacting terrible policies, those around Trump are unconstitutionally governing with some of the president’s constitutional powers along with the president himself but without the president’s knowledge or permission.

In other words, this presidency is by definition both a constitutional crises and inherently extraconstitutional.

Which begs the questions: Who is in charge? Who is making the decisions, how often, and when?  Who answers to whom? How aware is the president of any of this? How well can the president perceive the situation and understand the reality of his own White House? To what degree are America’s allies aware of all this and how is this damaging America’s relationships with them? To what degree are America’s rivals and enemies aware of this and how is this emboldening them and weakening American national security? If a major crisis erupts, if the U.S. is under attack, how would the country be led?

The disturbing and unacceptable truth is that we do not know the answers to any of these questions. We are like a ship unmoored with crew running around furiously to keep the ship from colliding or sinking but with no one at the helm. We have been fortunate—extremely fortunate—that so far, no major crisis has emerged to challenge this far-from-ideal modus operandi.

Some will argue that the officials undermining Trump are way out of bounds. Others will argue that Trump is so terrible that these actions are necessary. The great philosophical question—which will be debated as long as debate exists—is, do you stay true to the Constitution even as superiors destroy it, or do you violate the Constitution to protect it?

There is no easy answer, hence, we are where we are. 

Especially considering that Trump has not, as is also the case with his tax returns, released a recent credible and full medical record, a reality that is necessary to confront is that Trump’s age and physical condition make him an ideal candidate for “executive dysfunction” under conditions discussed by Mark Fisher, David Franklin, and Jerrold Post in the same journal issue as Goldstein’s aforementioned article. “Based on the known neuroanatomic localization of executive function and its well described age-dependent changes,” they write, “a significant proportion of political leaders over the age of 65 are likely subject to executive dysfunction.” Trump is 72 and can barely string together a complete sentence or stay focused in a meeting. Many around him question his mental state, and any honest view of video of a far younger Trump compared with President Trump makes it clear to all but the most fanatical that there has been some sort of mental degeneration in the interim.

However you feel, what is not in dispute is that the Constitution is being ignored and that the longer this continues, the more the American system and American credibility is undermined and the greater the chance that the American ship of state will run into disaster, with no guarantee it will be restored to its former functionality.  If America’s current extraconstitutional republic is not restored to a constitutional one, history will look back on Americans harshly, and justly so.

*****

Ultimately, this is actually all part of a massive “active measures” political warfare campaign by Russia, designed from the beginning to weaken and undermine American institutions from the top down, beginning first and foremost with the U.S. presidency but trickling down to all walks of American political life. To be sure, what I have termed the (First) Russo-American Cyberwar—Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bold and unprecedented campaign to install Trump in the White House—succeeded wildly beyond what probably most Kremlin planners had dreamed of, and a president that literally broke the U.S. Constitution almost from the get-go for the duration of his first few years in office (and who knows how much longer) was probably not a specifically anticipated or designed outcome, especially within this timeframe. But it would have been within the realm of desired outcomes, as placing an agent of chaos—witting or unwitting—in the oval office can obviously produce a wide range of outcomes that generally destabilize and weaken the United States, which most certainly were the Russian aims in 2015-2016, and, as the just-released latest Justice Department criminal charges show, still are the goals as we head into the 2018 midterm elections, carried out by some the same overall agents as before. This campaign of Putin’s is still further part of his overall war against the West, NATO, and democracy, or the rise of what I call worldwide (small-d) democratic fascism. Taken together, this is a new form of (cold) warfare, using Twitter and racism instead of tanks and rockets, but it is warfare nonetheless. 

And it is warfare we are losing.

That a sitting U.S. president is essentially not necessarily in charge and is being constantly ignored and sidelined by patriotic underlings, that the U.S. Constitution has ceased to properly function as intended, that the Trump presidency is operating outside the bounds of the Constitution and the law, may all be an overperformance on the stage that Putin has set, but make no mistake about it, this is all part of the Kremlin’s overall designs to do short, medium, and long-term damage to American political institutions, rule of law, politics, standing, culture, and the norms that support them. The longer this all continues unchecked, the more success that will be enjoyed by Russia and the more damage to the health, even survivability, of the American political system and the U.S. Constitution. If the true functioning U.S. Constitution is not restored soon and Trump and his now cultish, sycophantic Republican party remain in power, perhaps Trump’s successor will operate within the Constitution, but perhaps not. Far better to check Trump and the GOP in these midterms, than leave it to chance, for the history of the Roman Republic shows that once precedents are broken and the longer they are broken, the greater the propensity that they will be broken again or swept away by new precedents, in Rome’s case, an autocratic emperor-based system operating under the guise of a democratic republic, and even that eventually gave way to out-and-out acknowledged autocracy. To maximize our odds of not repeating and falling down the same degenerative path, it is essential to restore the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law by first checking Trump and his Republican enablers during today’s midterms, and then Constitutionally removing him and them from power as soon as possible, whether at the ballot box or through other measures as allowed within our properly functioning constitutional system.

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer and consultant from the New York City area who has been based in Amman, Jordan, since early 2014. He holds an M.S. in Peace Operations and specializes in a wide range of interrelated topics, including international and U.S. policy/politics, security/conflict/(counter)terrorism, humanitarianism, development, social justice, and history. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981

© 2018 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 

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Team Trump’s assaults on Mueller and McCabe are only the latest salvos in an intensifying Trump/GOP war on the rule of law and democracy itself

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse March 19, 2018

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981) March 19th, 2018

Photo by author

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AMMAN/TEL AVIV/HAIFA — One can easily go back to the domestic tyranny of Athenian democracy in ancient Greece, of the will of the demos often trampling over minority rights, to begin a long history of systems that were somewhat democratic and then failed, or democratic in appearance but oppressive in spirit. These systems had little protection for dissenters and/or minorities, and used democracy for some to destroy it for others. They were Tocquevillian tyrannies of the majority, built on exclusion of both “the other” and those not in lock-step with the ruling faction.

Such systems are obvious in Erdoğan’s Turkey, Putin’s Russia, Duterte’s Philippines, but less obvious in many other places.

And today, under the leadership of Donald Trump and an increasingly craven Republican Party, the United States of America is moving in this direction.

I’m old enough to remember a time, not so long ago, when both major parties could be counted on to support the rule of law—a core foundation of true democracy—at a bare minimum. 

That is no longer the case.

At this point, it would be good to understand what we mean when we say “democracy.” In a pure, technical sense, there are no democracies today: every modern national system avoids direct rule by the demos, the people, in favor of a system in which the demos choose from among themselves a number of representatives to govern.

Modern democracy can be understood to transcend the 1.) necessary but not sufficient mechanism of popular elections and to extend to include among the sufficient conditions: 2.) a justice and law enforcement system that is applied relatively equally and not used as a political tool of self-empowerment and oppression of others by those in power (this necessitates some degree of judicial independence), i.e., “rule of law”, 3.) a free press that can hold all parties accountable and provide an accurate picture of reality to the public, 4.) and a population free to express itself and not stupid enough to be manipulated by propaganda and demagogues, that can make at least somewhat informed decisions based on reality (although organized differently, these requirements roughly line up with the UN General Assembly’s list of the “essential elements” of democracy).

The typical political candidate usually asks you to vote for her to use the system and improve it to benefit you, the voter.

Trump and many of his fellow Republicans campaign to go to war with the system, to destroy.

By their virtue and abilities and with the power of the people behind them, they will sweep away the bureaucracy, institutions, politicians, laws, rules, and norms that supposedly hold us back. There is no love or praise of the system or working within it; the system is rotten to the core, there’s nothing to work with, it only has flaws, deserves only anger and contempt. They need to take existing legitimate problems and grossly exaggerate their intensity or to completely fabricate problems that do not exist but that play into people’s preconceived notions and prejudices to create a climate where their obscenities become acceptable.

Orwell would most masterfully present to the world in his masterpiece 1984 with its concept of Newspeak the language of such politics, 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.” Umberto Eco noted Orwell’s Newspeak makes “use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

There can be little doubt that this describes what Trump and his advance guard of language warrior beserkers are doing today in their war on reality. Such propaganda and the sheer stupidity of many people dancing together emerge in a horror of a feedback loop: more and more people are receptive to more and more absurd lies and distortions that only help to increase the numbers of the herd of credulous creatures lapping up lies like manna from Heaven. 

The dire threat to democracy today is the weaponization of the press (with which Trump is already long at war) concurrent with weaponizing the people, who, in turn, weaponize elections, the victors of which, in turn, can weaponize the justice and legal system into a political tool to stay in power, reward supporters and punish opponents, and control or bend the media to its will, corrupting or destroying all four of the key elements of healthy democracy. If this is allowed to happen, it is always with some combination of the ignorance of those voters who buy into the rulers’ propaganda, voters’ tacit approval, and/or voters’ enthusiastic embrace of a system that explicitly favors them and explicitly discriminates and punishes those with differing views and/or identities; it is always because of, not in spite of huge swaths of the population.

Thus, Trump and his Republican allies target the justice system—the FBI, including former Director James Comey, the just-heavily-pressured-to-resign and now formally fired former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and the FBI agents conducting the Russia probe; the Department of Justice, including Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his staff and their Russia probe, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and his predecessor, Sally Yates, as well as former tough-on-Russia U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara; various courts and federal judges, including the FISA court and its Republican-appointed judges; and other people and agencies—the professionals of which dare to serve the Constitution as their oath demands before serving Trump the man and his partisan agenda. 

The firing of McCabe, the “memo” baselessly attacking the FBI and Justice Department from the ridiculous and disgraced Trump acolyte Devin Nunes, Nunes’s fellow House Intel Republicans nakedly trying to cover for Trump in prematurely ending their Committee’s investigation into Trump and Russia and their baselessly disputing the intelligence community’s strong consensus that Putin acted to help Trump and hurt Clinton in the 2016 election, and now calls from Team Trump to terminate Mueller’s probe (and just after it was revealed that Mueller subpoenaed the Trump Organization for Russia-related documents) along with more Tweets from the president himself attacking those involved in the Russia investigation—including Trump’s first direct attack against Mueller and his team—are just the latest salvos in a clear effort to not only clearly obstruct justice turn the people against true non-partisan public servants in the justice system and to pave the way for partisan hacks eager to do Trump’s bidding, an effort that (of course) has the full and active support of Putin’s Kremlin and its army of cyber-Cossacks.

NBC News

We are seeing with Trump-appointed Attorney General Jeff Sessions a clear lack of vigor in pursuing civil rights and voting rights/suppression cases so central to allowing fair play in our society and elections, a lack of vigor that directly aids GOP efforts to twist elections in ways that tip the odds considerably in its favor. We are seeing that Trump’s allies in Congress seek to undermine everything related to the Russia probe and, instead, call for unwarranted investigations into Trump opponents—including Hillary Clinton—or even those investigating him. Trump and the GOP-dominated Congress will also have the opportunity to appoint and confirm more federal judges in his first term than any president in the last 40 years. All of these bits and pieces add up to a very real danger of a one-party state in which the rules and laws are twisted to allow that party to unfairly maintain control, in which the levers of justice and law enforcement are used as tools to suppress efforts to challenge this unfair use of what is supposed to be “a government of laws, and not of men,” to quote John Adams.

This is what happens in Turkey, Russia, and the Philippines, as well as in many other places more outwardly autocratic when a new leader comes to power and cleans house, installing minions ready to serve the Dear Leader, not the people or the state. In these places, the Dear Leader equates himself with the state and loyalty to himself with patriotism for the nation; Trump isn’t even being careful about his attempts to do just that.

With Rachel Brand, the no. 3 top official at the Department of Justice, resigning earlier this year, if Rosenstein quits or is fired or also has to recuse himself, Trump will likely have the Department’s leadership in his pocket, led by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and whatever likely partisan loyalists Trump appoints and Republicans confirm to replace Brand and/or Rosenstein. This could place Mueller’s entire Russia probe into jeopardy, since, with Sessions having had to recuse himself from the Russia probe (which enraged Trump) because of his own Russian entanglements, the replacements of Brand and Rosenstein could act on behalf of Trump and end the investigation with little to stand in their way. And we now that Trump is even considering firing Sessions and replacing him with Trump loyalist and current E.P.A. head Scott Pruitt, who would not be under obligation to recuse himself and could easily squash Mueller’s entire probe.

This is not normal, and this is entirely unprecedented in American history. The people and the media and elections failed, their pillars crumbling, to prevent a man who so clearly had contempt for the rule of law from becoming president; now, the last pillar that can prevent us from a real danger of becoming a banana republic—a generally professionally-run non-politically-partisan justice system that is faithful first and foremost to the Constitution and its rule of law—is under siege. The women and men manning its ramparts are doing an exemplary job of standing up to tyranny, but they need help from the people and the press and elections that will punish those laying siege, not reward them.

See related articles by the same author on Comey firing: With Comey Firing, Trump Moves America Closer to Banana Republic Status; How We Respond Is Vital to Preserving Our Democracy and on much of the deep history Mueller is almost certainly looking into between Team Trump & Team Russia: Think You Know How Deep Trump-Russia Goes? Think Again: This Chart/Info Will Blow Your Mind; also see his June 22, 2017, article for The Jordan Times: Ideal governance in ‘the rule of law, and not of men’

© 2018 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 (you can follow him there at @bfry1981). If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content, or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

*****

Though I originally published this article in the fall of 2013 during America’s last government shutdown, it is a sad measure of how little progress has been made that I can repost this piece today to explain relatively unchanged dynamics leading to such a debacle. We can just substitute Trump, Tom Cotton, and the Tea Party’s offspring, the Freedom Caucus, for the likes of Ted Cruz and the Tea Party and substitute the issues of DACA children migrants and immigration for the debt ceiling and budget cuts. Even if a shutdown is averted, the dynamics of partisan brinksmanship are alive and well and threaten America’s republic just as they threatened (and destroyed) the Roman Republic.

Published on LinkedIn Pulse January 19, 2018

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981) January 19th, 2018; originally published October 3rd, 2013, with the title “In Government Shutdown, Ted Cruz and Tea Party Are Lucky We’re Not Living in Ancient Rome” by then-PolicyMic, now Mic.

UPDATE 12:04 AM Jan 20th, 2018, the one-year anniversary of Trump’s inauguration: the government is now in a shutdown.

HBO. Rome’s forum—the equivalent of Washington, DC’s national mall—dirty and largely empty, closed for business during one of its many government shutdowns before the fall of the Roman Republic’s democracy.

AMMAN — As someone who’s written about ancient Roman history, I find these repeated Tea-Party-initiated shutdown and default crises amusing when, knowing that American troops might very well have their pay and benefits threatened, I think of how Roman legionaries would have reacted in similar situations and smile a bit thinking of Ted Cruz running through the streets of Washington with Roman troops in hot pursuit.

Contrary to popular belief, our Founding Fathers did not base our Constitution on the British constitutional monarchy, but on the Roman Republic. There were many historical and cultural similarities: from 509-49 BCE, the Roman republic functioned with a government based on popular sovereignty, with a deliberative legislative body called the Senate, with the people voting both for major office holders annually and yes-or-no on legislation coming from the Senate. Rome’s system was one of checks and balances, divided power, and compromise. The Republic needed its parts to cooperate, and the support of the people, to do much of anything.

Sound familiar?

And because of this superior system (so argued the ancient Greek historian Polybius), Rome came to dominate the Mediterranean world with it citizen-soldiers. But with amazing success came obscene corruption and partisanship, and from 133 BCE, after the first political violence in Rome since the early days of the Republic, Rome experienced internal conflict that would eventually destroy its republic.

Obstructionist (mostly) self-interested conservative elites — optimates — took on a group of (often) self-interested populist reformers — populares — for most of the next century. After decades of optimates stubbornly fighting all reform, when a conservative elitist general named Sulla and a populares former general named Marius (Caesar’s uncle!) had a major political falling out, Sulla marched his troops into the city of Rome in 88 — the first time Roman troops had ever marched on Rome — the streets flowed with blood, and there were years of civil war. Sulla later had himself appointed Rome’s first dictator since 202 (at the height of the Second Punic War), but gave those powers up a few years later after scrapping many hard-won populares‘ reforms.

Roman veterans were often left to languish in poverty or limbo by the conservative optimate-dominated Senate, fueling support for a major rebellion in 62-63. Even the most famous general of the day, Pompey “Magnus,” was rebuffed when he advocated for his own veterans. Julius Caesar, himself one of the moderate populares, was elected a consul for 59 but also found only obstructionism from the optimates, led now by Cato (namesake of today’s pro-Tea-Party, libertarian Cato Institute). One of Caesar’s major pieces of legislation also aimed to settle Pompey’s veterans, but Cato, who even admitted the bill was good, filibustered and obstructed every time he could to prevent its passage. Only some mild violence meted out by Caesar’s supporters, including Pompey’s veterans, against the obstructionist optimates and Cato during the assembly that voted overwhelmingly for its approval kept the law from being blocked on a ridiculous religious technicality.

An extreme member of the populares faction, Clodius, succeeded in terrorizing the city with increasing mob violence throughout the 50s, repeatedly causing major government shutdowns. Elections were long-delayed, important offices remained vacant, major scandals erupted, senior officials were attacked in public, and when Clodius was killed in 52, his supporters burned down the Senate with his funeral pyre. The Senate reluctantly authorized Pompey rarely-granted emergency powers to restore order, and soldiers were brought into the city under arms for the first time since Sulla.

Yet legionaries lining courts and public areas in Rome under a sole consul was not at all the way the Republic was supposed run. Cato and the optimates still hated Caesar so much that over the next few years they made clear to him that they would never let him rest and would do everything they could to drive him to ruin, including prosecution and exile. It was easy for Caesar to convince his soldiers that the Senate did not have the interests of them or the people of Rome in mind, that a mad faction had hijacked the Roman state and needed to be swept aside. 

After Caesar crossed the Rubicon in January 49, a new civil war erupted in which many senators were killed, and true republican government would never return to ancient Rome.

So when you say, “That couldn’t happen to America today!” realize that mass political violence, Roman armies marching on Rome, and government shutdowns had all either never happened or hadn’t in centuries, and were all unthinkable to Romans living before they actually happened; escalation begets escalation. That is what is so disturbing about the Tea Party today: its members’ willingness to do anything legal, even if unprecedented and previously unthinkable, to accomplish their goals against the will of the people sets dangerous precedents and deeply undermines the credibility of the government. And as we’ve seen with Rome, credibility that takes centuries to build can only take a generation to destroy. 

Learn your history, Tea Party.

© 2018 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, no republication without permission, attributed quotations welcome

Check out my related book chapter:

The Roman Republic in Greece: Lessons for Modern Peace/Stability Operations (Chapter 10 in Global Leadership Initiatives for Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding)

See related articles:

Redistricting at Heart of DC Dysfunction: Gerrymandering Making Politics More Partisan

Trump, the Specter of Political Violence, & Lessons From the Roman Republic (Or, We Have a Problem America!)

Caesar & the Politics of the Fall of the Roman Republic: Lessons for USA Today

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 (you can follow him there at @bfry1981). If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content, or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Nevada Key: State-by-State Predictions for Election 2016: Barely or BIGLY, Trump Likely to Lose

It could be close, but it may not be: Democrat Hillary Clinton should still win at least 274 Electoral College votes even if she loses big states like Ohio, North Carolina, and Florida, thereby defeating Republican Donald Trump on Election Day, and Nevada is the likely key; below, a state-by-state analysis of every competitive state.

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse November 7/8, 2016  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) November 7th/8th, 2016

270towin

AMMAN — I wrote after the third debate that the election was over and that Clinton would win unless there was some kind of major Surprise. Then, FBI Director Comey spoketh… And it’s closer than many thought possible.

As we pass through the homestretch and near Election Day, the discussion inevitably turns to maps and geography more so than any other time in the general election, and Americans get to reacquaint themselves with states other than their own, the existence of which they tend to forget when there is not a presidential election at hand. “Who are these mysterious denizens in distant lands who look at the same sky we do, can agree we both seem the same color, and then agree on nothing else whatsoever?” many ask.

Well, here is your guide to the map, states, and math of the Electoral College that will determine who will be the next president of the United States of America.

In order for Trump to defeat the favored Hillary Clinton, he would have to win almost all the battleground states. Now, this is why Clinton is favored in every major statistical model, and the gold-standard in polling analysis, Five Thirty Eight, has two models—one taking into account only polls and another taking into account polls and a few other factors like demographics and economics; the thing is, it’s not as daunting a task to win for Trump as one might think, hence Five Thirty Eight’s models wisely have Trump at about a 1-in-3 shot to become president.

And keep in mind folks: our magic number here is 270.

The Locks:

First, we have the states that are locks, barring a polling disaster or a political miracle (for all states, the number in parentheses is that state’s—and DC’s—number of Electoral College votes):

Hillary’s got these locked down: Vermont (3), Massachusetts (11), Rhode Island (4), Connecticut (7), New York (29), New Jersey (14), Delaware (3), Maryland (10), Washington, DC (3), Illinois (20), Washington (state) (12), Oregon (7), California (55), and Hawaii (4), for a total of 182 certain electoral votes for Clinton.

Donald’s got these states locked down: West Virginia (5), South Carolina (9), Kentucky (8), Tennessee (11), Alabama (9), Indiana (11), Mississippi (6), Missouri (10), Arkansas (6), Louisiana (8), North Dakota (3), South Dakota (3), Nebraska (5, but only 4 are certain because the state splits its votes), Kansas (6), Oklahoma (7), Montana (3), Wyoming (3), and Idaho (4), for a total of 116 certain electoral votes for Trump.

Locked electoral votes: 182 Clinton, 116 Trump

The Near-Locks:

For Clinton:

Then, we have states which look like they could be competitive in theory, but will not be unless something crazy happens: Virginia, Georgia, Minnesota, Texas, New Mexico, Alaska, plus Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District; let’s go through each by which candidate is an overwhelming favorite and why.

Virginia (13): Before Obama won Virginia in 2008, the last time Virginia voted for a Democrat was in 1964, but since 2008 it’s been solidly blue, only sending Democratic U.S. Senators to DC since and reelecting Obama in 2012. Its main population growth has been in the DC suburbs, an area with a young, diverse increase in population mainly working for or contracting with the much-reviled status-quo “Establishment” government; they are the system and won’t vote for someone who advocates tearing it down. So while Clinton’s pretty steady lead is modest, don’t expect it to succumb to a Trump assault. Virginia will almost certainly stay in Clinton’s camp.

New Mexico (5): While Trump appears within striking distance in New Mexico, don’t let that fool you: only once since 1992, in 2004, has New Mexico voted for a Republican for president, and both of its senators and 2 out of 3 House seats are Democratic. Also, Clinton’s polling lead there has generally fluctuated between modest and good, but her lead has been steady. And, of course, Trump’s ridiculous comments about Mexican immigrants has riled up the normally relatively apathetic Latino bloc: Latinos—and Mexican-Americans especially—are coming out to vote for Clinton in record numbers, and New Mexico is fertile ground for this trend to keep it solidly in her column on Election Day. It should very much end up in with Clinton’s in the end.

Minnesota (10): Minnesota is the most liberal state not on a coast in the country: it hasn’t gone for a Republican presidential candidate since Nixon in 1972 and did so only two other times—each time for Eisenhower in the 1950s—since 1932. In addition, 6 of its 8 House (and both Senate) seats are in Democratic hands—the only state in between the coasts with such an imbalance in favor of Democrats other than New Mexico—and Minnesota polls have shown a consistent and generally sizable lead for Clinton there. Keep dreaming, Trump.

This gives us an addition 28 electoral votes that are almost certainly going to Clinton

28 near-lock + 182 lock = 210 in Clinton’s column total

For Trump:

Georgia (16): The polling has been mighty close in Georgia, but, for the most part, it’s been a consistent lead for Trump, if only a small one; but Democrats shouldn’t kid themselves: while Georgia is changing demographically and is becoming a more diverse state, the state-level political machine is very much dominated by Republicans, who have ensured that only about 28.5% of its House delegation is Democratic and both of its senators are Republicans even though nearly 45.5% of its voters voted for Obama in the 2012 election; the state system is clearly stacked against Democrats. There is a reason the Voting Rights Act (VRA) preclearance provisions were so focused on the South: white conservative southerners had used the state and local governments for generations there to disenfranchise southern blacks; with the conservative Roberts Supreme Court striking down the preclearance provision of the VRA, in 2013, overall in the South it is quite clear that Republican state authorities are engaging in systematic attempts to make it harder for people to vote in heavily Democratic and heavily African-American areas, with at least 655 polling locations closed since the Supreme Court decision in the six southern states where data is available. Georgia is not included in the available data-set, but Georgia can almost certainly be sure to be part of this trend and, especially with African-American turnout seemingly down compared to when Obama was running, it would take a miracle for Clinton to win Georgia.

Texas (38): Yes, a large number of polls show that Clinton is within striking distance in Texas (and, personally as a Democrat, I can’t wait for that state to go purple and then blue), but it’s not going to happen in 2016, barring some crazy miracle. And yes, while unlike African-Americans, Latinos will be turning out in historic numbers for Clinton, with Republicans firmly in control of the state (the state hasn’t voted for a Democrat for president since 1976, only about 30.5% of its House delegation are Democrats and both its senators are Republicans both even though almost 41.4% voted for Obama in 2012) and trying to suppress voter turnout (at least 403 polling places have been closed in the state since the 2013 VRA decision), it would take something pretty crazy for her to top Trump in Texas.

Alaska (3): Though polls have shown a highly unusually close race in Alaska, and Five Thirty Eight’s models show Clinton with roughly the same chance of winning Alaska as Donald Trump has of winning either Wisconsin or Michigan, calm down, people, Trump is still up and it’s Alaska: this state only voted for a Democrat once, in 1964. Alaska is a diverse state, with Alaskan Natives/Native Americans a large portion of Alaska’s population—nearly 15%—and though they vote heavily Democratic, they have some of the lowest voter turnout rates of any group in the United States and hopes of Clinton taking the state would ride largely on the difficult task of turning them out. Don’t stay up late expecting Alaska to surprise anyone; it’s almost certainly going to be Trump territory.

Then there’s Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District (1), which famously voted for Obama in 2008, but not in 2012; whispers of Clinton having a shot have been heard, but in the scant polling we do have, nothing showed Clinton to be competitive, and there is no other evidence that this will be the case. Yes, there’s so little data that anything is possible, but take it to the bank that this is going stay Trump territory.

This adds another 58 electoral votes that are pretty definite for Trump

So 116 lock + 58 near-lock = 174 total for Trump total

So, certain/virtually certain Electoral Votes: 210 Clinton, 174 Trump

Now, below is where it gets more interesting…

The Upsets-Are-Very-Possible-States

Departing from the above states, we have a number of states where one candidate is moderately favored but where an upset is quite possible: Maine, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Utah, and Arizona. Let’s break them down by which candidates are favored.

Advantage Clinton:

Maine (4 at stake in total, 3 at stake for the 1st Congressional District and overall winner): Overall, Maine is surprisingly close, and while a few polls have it very close, most have given Clinton a healthy lead; still, Maine is a very white state, and the whitest states have been her weakest during the primaries against Sanders and are also her weakest during this general election at the same time, but unlike most very white states, Maine’s population is relatively well-educated, a trait that hurts Trump’s chances. It is not very populous state, so any swing can make a big difference; Clinton is still an overwhelming favorite, and the state hasn’t voted GOP in a presidential race since 1988, but don’t count Trump out. Trump is far more likely to get 1 of Maine’s 4 electoral votes, from the state’s 2nd Congressional District (see further below), than he is to win the state outright.

Pennsylvania (20): While Pennsylvania has tightened in recent days, Clinton’s lead here has been averaging a very consistent moderate one, though one that has shrunken a bit in recent days. It’s not big enough to close the window on Trump but isn’t so small that it doesn’t make her a clear and substantial favorite. Yet possibly lower African-American turnout could mean Clinton doesn’t get quite the boost she is hoping for from Philadelphia.

Ballotpedia

And another point, and this is where we get into the whole early-voting situation and FBI Director Comey’s letters: Pennsylvania is one of a handful of states where there is no early voting and where only a specific set of reasons allow a person to absentee vote. Before Comey’s latest public statement, released yesterday, which exonerates (for a second time) Clinton of any prosecutable wrongdoing in her e-mails/server situation, I would have said that his previous incredible statement of October 28th—that new e-mails were found in the process of a possible sex-crime investigation on Anthony Weiner’s laptop, which he apparently shared with top Clinton aide Huma Abedin, which may be relevant to the Clinton investigation but which neither Comey nor the FBI has begun examining, meaning there was no evidence to report yet (a statement that altered the race, hurt Clinton, and helped Trump)—could have led to a dip in Clinton’s support in general and especially in states that do not allow early voting, since very few people there would have been allowed to vote before that damaging statement from Comey came out, and since people voting on Election Day would have had this e-mail thing as likely the last revelation of the 2016 campaign and the piece of information most fresh in their minds in the voting booth. 

In other words, in a close race, that October 28th Comey revelation could have made it closer or even changed the outcome. With the new revelation exonerating Clinton from wrongdoing coming only 48 hours before Election Day, on one level, this probably reduces some of the damage from the earlier statement; but the fact is that that previous statement gave America a week of non-stop negative coverage of Clinton and this new one came so late it might not make much of a difference at all: people might even miss the information depending on how busy and engaged they were/are with just two days left (a further question that will be very difficult to answer is: how many people would have voted differently during early voting if they had known now that they know from Comey’s latest revelation and/or if they had never heard the previous Comey statement; that is a mighty difficult question to answer, yet it is still very troubling that we even need to be asking this question, much to the discredit of Comey and the FBI). Another thing to consider is that even though this is “good” news for Clinton, it is still news that keeps the spotlight on this e-mail/server issue, one of Clinton’s worst, and not the issues, not her positives, not Trump’s negatives. Especially in a close race that does not allow early voting, the whole FBI e-mail stuff is still what has colored the last stretch of the campaign, so even with the latest exoneration this stuff probably hurts, more than helps, Clinton.

Still, Pennsylvania looks good for Clinton, and the state hasn’t picked a Republican for president since 1988, but it doesn’t look that good for her, and Trump has a decent chance of winning, or failing that, quite a good chance of making Pennsylvania a very tight race and much closer than expected. Bet on Clinton, but don’t bet the house.

Michigan (16): Michigan is quite an interesting state; on paper, it’s generally shown a steady and moderate Clinton lead in the polls, but with a few exceptions. However, Michigan became one of the greatest polling disasters in polling history—and the greatest in primary history—during the Michigan Democratic Primary, when Bernie Sanders ever so narrowly upset Hillary Clinton; it was the surprise Brexit (so far) of the 2016 election season. There are plenty of reasons—lower black enthusiasm, higher white enthusiasm, anger at trade deals, etc., that Trump won big in the primary and Clinton lost to Sanders—to look at a Trump upset as a serious possibility in this state. Plus, the state-level government is totally controlled by Republicans. And oh, Michigan is another state without early voting and which is strict with absentee voting, raising the possibility of Clinton’s e-mails weighing disproportionately heavily on voters’ minds here. She is definitely favored, and Michigan hasn’t gone Republican for president since 1988, but the people at the Clinton campaign sure aren’t taking Michigan for granted; nor should they. 

Wisconsin (10): With a generally steady and moderate lead for Clinton, Wisconsin isn’t quirky like Michigan, and it isn’t as close in polling as Pennsylvania, but that doesn’t mean it is out of Trump’s reach: the state government is totally controlled by Republicans, with controversial Gov. (and former 2016 presidential candidate) Scott Walker at the helm. Conversely, if Michigan is possibly weaker for Clinton because she narrowly lost to Sanders there, it must be mentioned that former 2016 Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz trounced Trump in the Wisconsin Republican Primary; additionally, Wisconsin hasn’t voted for a Republican president since 1984. Both Michigan and Pennsylvania are better bets for Trump, though he still has a decent, if smaller, shot at Wisconsin.

This adds 49 more electoral votes to Clinton’s column, probable but far from certain or even close to certain

49 likely + 210 lock/near lock = 259 looking good for Clinton overall

Advantage Trump:

Iowa (6): For a while it seemed like Iowa would be pretty competitive, but as the campaign draws to a close, the polling trends have moved decidedly in Trump’s favor; Clinton still has a shot, but that shot has become smaller just when she would have hoped the opposite would be true. Expect Trump to prevail in Iowa.

Utah (6): Utah undoubtedly has to win the novelty prize of “most interesting race:” For a while, the state was host a tight three-way race between Trump, Clinton, and independent conservative and one of the last true standard-bearers of the conservative #NeverTrump movement, Mormon Utahn Evan McMullin. Unlike the vast majority of conservative Christians—who have proven themselves little more than rank hypocrites in supporting Trump after harping so long on “family values” as an issue, Mormons have admirable actually demonstrated a fidelity to their principles and have never warmed up to Trump; in fact, they really don’t like him. But polls in the last few weeks have shown Trump with a moderate and steady lead, and Utah seems to be his to lose. Still, with many Mormons being so principled and passionate in their feelings against Trump, it’s quite possible that anti-Trump Mormons may turn out in higher numbers than expected and vote for their fellow Mormon. McMullin has been surprisingly impressive, and still has the ability to shock and be the surprise of the election, but it is still an uphill battle for him, and even more so for Clinton in a conservative state, no matter how close they are; expect Trump to win but allow room for a surprise.

IF McMullin does pull off an upset—hardly inconceivable—his victory could throw a monkey wrench into the whole Electoral College math in some interesting scenarios where neither Trump nor Clinton hit 270 Electoral College votes, sending the election… to Congress? See more at the end of my article (coming soon)…

Arizona (11): Arizona has only gone once for a Democrat in a presidential election since 1952: Bill Clinton, in 1996. This time around, there has been a mostly steady and moderate lead for Trump, though a few more relatively recent polls have it very close and a few even have Clinton up a sliver. It should still go Trump, except… as mentioned, there is a dramatic increase in Hispanic voter turnout this election, and this could put Arizona in play. But there is also an increase in white turnout, as well, which may even outpace the big bump in Latino participation. And Republicans control the entire state government, having at least 212 polling places been closed in the state since the 2013 Supreme Court VRA decision. Even with a Latino surge, with the polls the way they are, a competing white surge, the state dominated by the GOP, and a longer-term national Republican strategy of voter suppression already in place, Arizona is likely to remain with Trump.

This gives another 23 likely, but hardly certain, electoral votes to Trump

23 likely + 174 lock/near lock votes = 197 for Trump

So far, that’s 259 for Clinton and 179 for Trump

The Battlegrounds

Finally, true battleground states where things are most in doubt are Florida, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Ohio, Colorado, and Nevada, as well as Maine’s 2nd Congressional District; we’ll divide these into leans and true tossups.

Leans Clinton

Colorado (9): Clinton had a good-sized lead in Colorado for most of October, but after the Comey announcement of October 28th, polling showed the race here tightening considerably. Still, even though the race is closer, she is shown to have a clear if slight lead, and the fact of the matter is that the demographics of Colorado are very much against Donald Trump, not just because the state is diverse, but because much of the white population is young and Millennial-heavy, profusely college-educated, and liberal. It may be a very close race, but this ground is not favorable to Trump, not enough to give him a victory without a lot of luck and a big surprise. Colorado is a state that has changed a lot and now seems firmly on a path that will keep it a blue state in terms of presidential politics for the foreseeable future.

Nevada (6) TIPPING POINT: The polling in Nevada—perhaps the most difficult state of all to poll for a mix of reasons—has been balanced out to being pretty much tied (not so much with actual ties but with a number of polls canceling each other out), and it would be easy to include it in the tossup category… Except that a lot of early voting data suggests that the race is basically over, that Latino and Democratic turnout has so exceeded expectations in favor of Clinton and without an increase in whites large enough to offset this, that the race can already be called for Clinton in the eyes of the most reputable authority on Nevada politics, Jon Ralston, especially considering that the vast majority (70%) of Nevada voters voted early in 2012.

So Clinton might have already won Nevada before Election Day, with the Nevada State Democratic Party and Harry Reid’s political machine delivering her a victory through an exceptional early-voting-drive effort; it would be fitting particularly for Reid, since it was arguably his machine that delivered Nevada to Clinton in the contest with Sanders, and, as I have pointed out, that was the point where Clinton effectively defeated Sanders for the nomination, even if many others did not realize this at the time. Yes, this would be quite a curtain call for Reid, set to retire after suffering a terrible head injury while exercising back on New Years’ Day in 2015.

Given what we know from early voting, it’s very hard to see Trump winning Nevada.

This means that looking at how uncertain other parts of the race are, considering how in-doubt Nevada was until early voting data came in and how Colorado was thought to be much less competitive than Nevada, if we look at the map and do the math, if we consider Colorado a state more secure for Clinton than Nevada, then we can basically say that Nevada is the tipping point, because it is with Nevada secure—the least secure of all the contests for her in which she is favored—that she has enough Electoral College votes to win the election regardless of who wins New Hampshire, North Carolina, or Florida, the outcomes of which are far more in doubt; Nevada in this case is the kingmaker, then, or, rather, we should say queenmaker.

So 15 electoral votes (with Nevada being the final 6) + the 259 we already gave to Clinton = 274.

Game over.

*****

But, let us finish our analysis:

Leans Trump

Maine’s 2nd Congressional District (1): Polls previously had this very rural, extremely white part of Maine solidly in Trump’s camp, but over the last month is has tightened and now the polls indicate it will be a toss-up. But aside from very being white, it is also not as well-educated as the rest of Maine, making it fertile ground for Trump; thus, even with the numbers indicating a tie, in the end, the demographics suggest that Trump is more likely to prevail than Clinton.

Ohio (18): Ohio always seems to be a crucial state in elections: since 1804—its first election—the state has only failed to vote for the winning presidential candidate 9 times, and only twice in the 20th century, in 1944 (weirdly enough) and 1960.  But there’s a pretty good chance that Ohio will pick the loser in 2016, for the first time in 56 years. Clinton has a decent shot, but not a great one: for most of the last month, Trump has had a steady and moderate lead, but very recently a number of very close polls came out; if not for these polls, I would have had Ohio in the previous category. On one level, Ohio is mad about Bill Clinton’s NAFTA trade deal, plus African-Americans, as mentioned, have been coming out to vote in lower numbers than in 2008 and 2012, Ohio included; on another level, Clinton still managed to beat Sanders soundly here in the primary, while Trump was embarrassed by then-rival and sitting governor of the state John Kasich, who refused to vote for Trump and wrote in John McCain’s name in early voting. Still, the Republicans control the entire state government and Trump is definitely favored here: Clinton has about as good a chance of winning Ohio as Trump does of winning the whole election: according to Five Thirty Eight models, about one-in-three. It could be really close, but Trump should win here.

This means we have 19 electoral votes that lean trump

19 leans + 197 likelies, locks/near locks = 216 electoral votes for Trump

That’s 274 electoral votes for Clinton, 216 for Trump even before the most in-doubt races are factored into the mix, but let’s go into them anyway, since the above numbers are likely, but hardly guaranteed.

True tossups:

New Hampshire (4): Clinton had a relatively steady lead here, but polls tightened over the last week or so, and even though she still seems to have an overall edge in polling, there are many contradictory polls; given New Hampshire’s famous propensity for bucking trends and defying prediction, being independent-minded, and having a strong libertarian streak, it’s just too hard to predict this one. Clinton got crushed here by Bernie Sanders, and Trump dominated his opponents here on the other side of that primary, but the state also voted for Obama twice and voted for Kerry in 2004. The state is also overwhelmingly white, but also very educated. On top of it all, New Hampshire is one of those few states that does not have early voting and has strict absentee voting, begging the question of how the whole FBI/Comey stuff will play out. New Hampshire, you’re tough, and I honestly don’t have a prediction to make.

North Carolina (15): Going into the final few weeks, a number of conflicting polls emerged, with a majority showing Clinton with a slight-to-moderate lead, but a strong minority giving Trump a lead, and most of those a slight one; the final poll showed a tie. If this wasn’t confusing enough, North Carolina is a relatively educated state, with a strong number of college-degree holding whites and a large African-American population; conversely, white turnout is up in North Carolina and African-American turnout is down in the state after the GOP closed a number of polling sites, and the state government is totally controlled by Republicans, who have been exposed there as systematically trying to “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision” with voter suppression in a federal appeals court rulingfrom late July that struck down some of the North Carolina Republicans’ attempts to restrict voting, a ruling which a 4-4 deadlocked Supreme Court was unable to overturn at the end of August (had Scalia survived, he certainly would have made that a 5-4 decision overturning the federal appeals court ruling). The state voted for Obama in 2008 (the first time a Democrat won the presidential race there since Jimmy Carter won the state in 1976), but then went for Romney in 2012, and with plenty of reasons for both campaigns to be optimistic and both campaigns to worry, it is unclear how the state will go once all the votes are counted in 2016.

Florida (29): Oh, Florida, it’s always crazy in Florida on Election Day. Polls in Florida have been a bit all over the place, about half showing Clinton with a small lead and half showing Trump with a small lead (plus one) tie. And there are reasons for both sides to be optimistic: Clinton is happy that Florida is a diverse state and that in its vibrant Latino community turnout is dramatically up in early voting, but the white vote is also way up, the Democrats’ lead in early voting is less than it was in 2008, and Republicans control the entire state government, a position from which they may be engaging in voter suppression, as Republicans have been apt to do this election cycle: after Hurricane Matthew hit, Republican Governor and enthusiastic Trump supporter Rick Scott did not even want to extend voter registration, but he was sued by the Florida Democratic Party and a federal judge forced him to extend the deadline. Thus, Florida, as usual, is also too close to call, give the polling and what I laid out.

I really think these last three states are just too close to call, so that’s 48 electoral votes that are anybody’s guess. But this still gives us a range:

Likely closest result: 274 Clinton, 264 Trump

Likely biggest gap: 322 Clinton, 216 Trump 

The Crazy Scenarios if Nobody Gets to 270

Then, there are the crazy scenarios with a realistic chance of actually happening, where neither Clinton nor Trump hit 270.

For starters, let’s say that the states go as I have predicted and say that New Hampshire goes for Clinton with North Carolina and Florida going to Trump, with the exceptions that Trump pulls off upsets in Nevada and Colorado: ladies and gentleman, we would be tied 269-269, and the election would go to the incoming Congress (more on that in a bit, and wow, Maine’s 2nd Congressional District would look mighty important in such scenario).

But then we have other crazy scenario: if Evan McMullin wins Utah (hardly an extremely remote possibility given what I laid out) there are a number of very close scenarios where candidates could be just a few electoral votes shy of getting 270, sometimes just a single vote (Maine’s 2nd Congressional District could be a kingmaker here if it went Clinton) . And, again, we go to Congress.

There are other scenarios where neither Clinton nor Trump reaches 270, but these are easily the most likely, the other being dramatically more remote but hardly impossible (scenarios involving less competitive states above the battleground tier, as outlined above).

I’ll avoid going into those since they are far more remote, but feel free to play with your own maps.

But, under the Constitution, when the election goes to Congress, the president is chosen by the state congressional delegations from the incoming House of Representatives class (extremely likely to be majority-Republican), with each delegation getting one vote: all of Texas’ congressmen are equal to Montana’s one congressman. They would be allowed to choose from the top three electoral vote receivers, and if McMullin’s Utah delegation could pull in other Republican states’ representatives who are hostile to Trump into a bloc, they could prevent enough delegations from picking Trump, who would need 26 out of the 50 delegations to win. Meanwhile, the Senate would select the VP from the top-two electoral-vote receivers for the vice presidency, with senators voting as individuals; if the House could not pick a winner with at least 26 delegations by the inauguration, the VP chosen from the Senate would become president; if Senate was deadlocked, the president would be the incoming Speaker of the House (likely Paul Ryan but not certainly so).

On top of all of this? A Bernie Sanders support who is 1 out of 12 electors in the Electoral College for Washington State, which a lock for Clinton, has explicitly said he will not vote for Clinton in the Electoral College regardless of how his state votes; if he stays true to his statement, then Clinton will lose 1 electoral vote. If some of the aforementioned wackier scenarios play out, this one obnoxious man may decide the fate of the nation, and perhaps Western democracy and the world…

About That Popular Vote…

With lots of close races, it’s going to come down to turnout. Can Obama’s personally hitting the campaign trail help to make up some of the gap between black turnout in 2012 and 2008 compared to reports of lower turnout thus far in 2016? Can Trump turnout whites in record-enough numbers to upset Clinton? Will Latinos, like the Ents in The Lord of the Rings, wake up to their potential power and be kingmakers in key states like Florida, Arizona, and Nevada?

As for the numbers of popular vote, the best pollster in politics, Ann Selzer, just released a national poll which had Clinton at 44%, Trump at 41%, 4% for Gary Johnson, and 2% for Jill Stein; 1% did not know, 3% voted/intended to vote but not for president (think of this as the disgusted vote), and a whopping 4% did not want to tell their choice; as I wrote in my early October prediction of how voters might shift before Election Day (I seemed to have underestimated the collapse of Johnson and Stein, but my best guess from then was about Clinton 45%, Trump 43%, Johnson 6% and 2-3% for Stein, with about 4.5% undecided that I wouldn’t dare guess), I noted how I thought the vast majority of those who said they did not want to share their intentions were probably Trump voters; if I am right here, the popular vote margin could be very close; Clinton could even lose the popular vote while winning the electoral college, something that, given what I just mentioned, seems a more likely scenario that any would have thought previously (I didn’t say likely, just more possible). If I am wrong about those people who didn’t want to share their choice with pollsters, Clinton should win the popular vote by a small but clear margin, but perhaps the Latino surge will outperform these surveys and give Clinton more than a small margin in the popular vote; probably the main reason she will win by a larger margin if so, and, possibly the main reason she will win in general.

It’s also quite reasonably possible that the polls are off by “a normal polling error” across the board, kind of like with Brexit; if this is the case, we could see a decent-sized Trump win, but that could mean a Clinton blowout.

We’ll know very soon. Nothing to worry about here, only the fate of American and Western democracy…

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Trump’s flirtatious waltz with hints and threats of political violence cannot be ignored and should not be underestimated. Apart from echoing some of America’s own worst episodes in the South after the Civil War, such dangerous dancing brings to mind the lessons of the ancient Roman Republic, and how, after centuries of peaceful politics and peaceful transitions of power, one horrible incident of political violence begat many others in subsequent decades, culminating in civil war and the death of Rome’s democratic Republic; the Roman Republic far outlasted America’s republic (so far) even before that violence began, so anyone who thinks the United States is immune from a similar fate is suffering from a hubris that ignores history and human nature and the terrible consequences of precedent-shattering political violence.

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse October 23, 2016 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) October 23rd, 2016 (UPDATED 10/26 to further discuss race & politics in America)

AP Photo/ Evan Vucci

Silvestre David Mirys (1742-1810) – Figures de l’histoire de la république romaine accompagnées d’un précis historique Plate 127: Gaius Gracchus, tribune of the people, presiding over the Plebeian Council

AMMAN — We have already had people being punched at Trump rallies, clashes with police, a mini-riot by Bernie Sanders fans inside a Democratic state convention in Nevada and that Bernie Sanders himself all but seemed to fully excuse at the time, and now, a firebombing of a Republican HQ in a county in North Carolina.

Trump Fanning Flames of Unrest

In the midst of all this Trump has convinced many of his supporters that there is a global top-to-bottom conspiracy to cheat him of the election and that this election—which is only just beginning—is already rigged against him and, by extension, his supporters (never mind how astronomically impossible that such a rigging as he describes it would actually be happening). In fact, he has been so successful at this that almost 70% of Republicans believe Clinton can only win by cheating and half of Republicans would refuse to accept her as president. At the final debate, he even raised serious doubts about whether he would accept the results of the election, putting in jeopardy an unbroken tradition going back to George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson in 1796-1797 of a peaceful transfer of power between presidents and the loser accepting the outcome, even in hotly disputed or controversial elections like those in 1800, 1824, 1876, 1888, 1960, and 2000. The day after the debate, he doubled down on this rhetoric and failed to alleviate the concerns he had raised the previous night, joking(?)/stating(?) that he would accept the election results “if I win.”

If that wasn’t bad enough, Trump has been saying that there is a need for volunteers to “watch” polling places to make sure there is no “voter fraud” and is encouraging his partisan supporters to undertake this task that is supposed to be bi-partisan and non-partisan, and he and his surrogates are specifically suggesting monitoring of certain urban (code word for heavily-black) areas. In places like Texas and Florida, over 80% of Republicans think that voter fraud is a major problem, with zero evidence to support this but ample rhetoric from Team Trump and the GOP trumping reality yet again with their misinformation and disinformation.

Yes, angry, white, possibly-well-armed Trump supporters—people who number in the tens of millions, who are passionately convinced Trump is right and should be president, who are now talking of assassination, revolution, and coups should Hillary be elected—are already talking about descending upon minority-heavy polling areas on Election Day in an effort to make sure such shifty (in their view) minorities, prone to election malfeasance (in their view), don’t try anything funny; and yes, many of these people own guns and will show up openly armed because in many locations they will be allowed to do so, and yes, out of Trump’s tens of millions of devotees, we can certainly expect many thousands to show up as he has asked them to, and to show up in this manner, at polling places on November 8th, something that will more likely than not lead to trouble, especially in America’s increasingly racially-tense atmosphere. For those who don’t know their history, this was how white Southerners intimidated and usually prevented freed slaves and African-Americans from voting, from Reconstruction all the way through the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Never mind that Republican and Democratic officials at all levels, including local election officials from both parties, have dismissed as absurd the idea that the election is rigged or that any local polling places are going to be compromised or part of a voter fraud scheme. Never mind that voter fraud is practically non-existent, and that campaigns claiming to want to deal with voter fraud are more about denying minorities the ability to vote than anything else (for actual voter fraud on a staggering scale, see Vladimir Putin’s Russia).

Unfortunately, this election is a moment of terror, and for many Latinos, Muslims, African-Americans, and others, it must on a personal level be a terror that far exceeds any emotions I have on the issue as a white male. I am not sure if state and local authorities are up to the challenge, are aware of what could really happen in a realistic worst-case scenario here: thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, maybe more, of Trump supporters, many who could be armed, are going to be seeking to either harass and intimidate people they falsely believe, with no evidence, are committing voter fraud—picking people out by skin color almost certainly—or maybe even just be flat-out seeking to disrupt voting in liberal precincts in an effort to suppress minority votes (again, nothing new in American history and something that has happened in living memory). Violence, riots, voter disenfranchisement—all are in the realm of realistic possibility on Election Day now. We have already recently seen what crowds and individuals can do when animated by racial animus, crowds on different sides of the debate, from crowds of mainly angry black citizens to crowds of paranoid police in a cycle that seems to have been reignited since Ferguson after decades of near dormancy.

I am not being hyperbolic. I am not being paranoid. And Donald Trump’s rhetoric to millions of his supporters that the election is being stolen from them and that they need to go “watch” polling places is not abating or going away; nothing inherent in American society makes it immune to internal violence or breakdowns of law and order. This is the reality mere weeks before Election Day, and I hope federal, state, and local law enforcement are planning accordingly; some are aware of these dire possibilities, but whether they are given the resources to deal with this possibility, or if their plans are competent, remains to be seen.

Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

Lesson’s From Ancient Roman Politics

Is this a Rubicon moment for America?

HBO/Rome

Not really a Rubicon moment, but more of a Gracchi moment.

By a Rubicon moment, I am using a colloquialism of a point-of-no-return when a drastic action is taken. This word Rubicon in this case refers to the moment in 49 B.C.E., when Julius Caesar crossed south over the Rubicon River with his army, a river which marked the boundary between a province where his army was authorized to operate and Roman Italy proper where it was not after the Senate left him a choice between what would have been an unjust prosecution at the hands of his political rivals on one hand and starting a civil war (only the second since the founding of the Roman Republic in 509. B.C.E. but also the Republic’s last, the Republic itself not surviving this final round) on the other. But the Roman Civil War that began in 49 B.C.E. was merely the culmination of a number of awful trends that started in 133. B.C.E.

We are clearly not at a Rubicon moment in America, the second most successful republic in history after Rome’s ancient one.

But, still terrifyingly, we may be approaching a 133 moment: the snowball which starts an avalanche.

What happened in 133? After the Romans’s version of the Revolutionary War that overthrew the rule of kings in 509. B.C.E., apart from some minor incidents early in Rome’s history as a Republic that are more legendary than anything certain, Rome essentially had three-and-a-half centuries worth of relatively stable, democratic republican government; political violence was a minimum or nonexistent, and nothing like an officially directed assassination, civil war, or use of the military to settle internal political disputes ever occurred. Sure, its democratic qualities evolved over time and like even modern democracies there were factors that favored elites, much like in the United States, which did not even begin with allowing all white adult men to vote, let alone blacks or women. In fact, some states in America did not even have popular votes in the first presidential election, during which all had property-owning requirements for voting for president if there were popular votes at all, requirements that were only gradually abolished in the coming decades, starting with New Hampshire in 1792, though a greater degree of democracy was practiced at the state and local levels. Still, it was not until 1856 that all white male citizens in America were finally able to vote regardless of property ownership, and that was only 14 years before freed slaves and all adult males were given the right to vote with the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1870.

By 133 B.C.E., common Romans had long had an important role in selection of the Republic’s senior magistrates, and, in particular, there was one office that from Rome’s earliest days was created to be a sacred, inviolable protector of the people: the tribunate. The tribunes of the plebs (short for plebeians, the members of the lower class) were elected each year and could prosecute any other government official for abuse of power, as well as veto any government act, and introduce legislation of their own accord and even bypass the Roman Senate and go directly to the people’s assemblies to pass their programs, even though this was against unofficial custom. The most powerful political officeholders were the two annually elected chief executives, the consuls (think of America having to co-equal presidents elected every year), who presided over the Senate and had more power than any other elected officials. These two offices are important to understand when looking at the events from 133 on, and the below chart I created gives a good idea of how the Roman government operated:

It is also important to understand the seismic changes going on in Roman society at this period in its history. After well over a century of on-and-off-again conflict, Rome had finally succeeded in literally wiping its greatest rival Carthage off the map in 146 B.C.E., a Carthage that was just a shadow of its former self long before that final last gasp. As a result of Rome’s successful wars, a huge influx of slaves into Roman lands meant that many small freeholding farmers were put out of business as wealthy elites created huge estates run by slave labor and greedily gobbled up the land of small farmers. Rome had gone from a primarily small-farming Republic to an overseas empire dominated by large slave-owning landowners. Roman cities swelled with newly landless urban poor, many of them veterans and their descendants, veterans who had been unable to maintain their family farms fighting for years at a time in long, overseas wars; Rome’s elites were clearly leaving the concerns of the poor masses unattended. 

While Carthage and others were a threat, the different classes of Roman society were forced to work together in a spirit of pragmatism to fend off so many existential foes (this is similar to the moderation and bipartisanship exhibited in American politics during its Cold War with the Soviet Union). But a new political culture of selfishness, greed, and ambition, each rising to new heights, was emerging in Rome with the destruction of Carthage. There was just so much unprecedented power to be had that the stakes of and how far people were willing to go in politics had reached new levels; competition became much stiffer as a few of the most powerful elite families were drowning out the other lower aristocrats. Corruption grew by leaps and bounds as a result, and the tradition of the abstemious, stoic, small farmer ideal had become just that, that ideal further from being a reality than at any time in Roman history and that gap only about to get worse. In fact, it got so bad that the governing Romans began to be worried that the military was going to lose its base of recruitment, at that point limited to landowners. And decades later in the first century B.C.E., the interests of large multinational corporations called publicani helped to put so much money into the political system that Roman senators could not be trusted to fight for the people over their own and publicani pocketbooks.  

Even at the time, many contemporary Romans of the first century B.C.E. were aware that the post-Carthage culture of Roman elites of greed, corruption, ambition, scorched-earth politics, and extreme partisanship bieing placed over both the common good and a spirit of compromise; this new culture was at the heart of the disease which led to the death of the Republic (nominally in 27 B.C.E. but really in 49 B.C.E.); in the words of the ancient Roman historian Sallust, it was peacetime, not war, which undid Rome:

“Fear of a foreign enemy preserved good political practices. But when that fear was no longer on their minds, and arrogance, attitudes that prosperity took over. the tranquility they had longed for in difficult times proved, when they got it, to be more cruel and bitter than adversity. For the aristocracy twisted their ‘dignity’ and the people twisted ‘liberty’ towards their desires; every man acted on his own behalf, stealing, robbing, plundering. In this all political life was torn apart between two parties, and the Republic, which had been our common ground, was mutilated…self-indulgence and arrogance, attitudes that prosperity loves, took over. As a result the tranquility they had longed for in difficult times proved, when they got it, to be more cruel and bitter than adversity. For the aristocracy twisted their ‘dignity’ and the people twisted ‘liberty’ towards their desires; every man acted on his own behalf, stealing, robbing, plundering. In this way all political life was torn apart between two parties, and the Republic, which had been our common ground, was mutilated…

And so, joined with power, greed without moderation or measure invaded, polluted, and devastated everything, considered nothing valuable or sacred, until it brought about its own collapse.” ( The Jurgurthine War 41.1-10)

To place Rome’s rapid rise in perspective, consider that by 133, Rome had gone in living memory from surviving multiple existential threats from Carthaginians, Gauls, and Greeks, had gone from just controlling Italy, Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, and some of Spain’s east coast to dominating nearly the entire Mediterranean either directly or indirectly; specifically, 133 was year of remarkable fortune for Rome: the late King of Pergamum—a wealthy Greek kingdom in what is now Turkey un western Asian Turkey—had actually willed his entire domain to the Roman Republic, and it passed to Rome upon his death in 133. Rome had already grown dramatically in size, wealth, and power, adding most of northern Italy, all of Greece, most of Spain, most of Southern France, and much of Carthage’s old African holdings to its domains. But Rome’s Western territories were far less developed than the older, fabulously wealthy cities and kingdoms of the East. The addition of the Asian Kingdom of Pergamum to the Republic’s empire had Roman businessman salivating as the prospect of the profits from the riches of doing business in the Asian east.

The Gracchi and Rome’s Descent Into Political Violence

Jean-Baptiste Claude Eugène Guillaume- The Gracchi

The year this remarkable gift to Rome came about, one of the tribunes of the plebs that had won election for that year of 133 was an ambitious but high-minded would-be reformer: Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, hailing from two very famous and elite Roman bloodlines. A champion of the masses, the Greco-Roman historian Plutarch has GRacchus giving a passionate speech in which he lamented that while the

“wild beasts of Italy have their dens and holes to lurk in…the men who fight and die for our country enjoy the common air and light and nothing else…The truth is that they fight and die to protect the wealth and luxury of others. They are called the masters of the world, but they do not possess a single clod of earth which is truly their own” (Plutarch Tiberius Gracchus 9). 

And this was the center of his program: doing something about the wealthy’s assault on the small-farm landowners who were disappearing as a class. But Gracchus was hardly looking to liquidate the rich: his proposal was to use a preexisting law that had been on the books for centuries that had long been unenforced, one which limited the amount of public land that any one individual could own. That limit was still quite large, but far less than what the ultra-wealthy had accumulated in the years of Rome’s great expansions, during which many Romans elites had used fake names to accumulate more than the legal limit. The excess land would be handed over to the poor, but in return for accepting this legal limit, all the legal-sized holdings would be formally recognized as legitimate and each son of these landowners would be given a portion of land equal to half the maximum size.

As would be expected, though, these wealthy landowners dominated the Senate, and they refused to go along with this compromise scheme even though the problems of ultra-concentration of land and wealth and the rapid rise of landless poor were all at a crises points.

Thus Gracchus, as was his legal-but-frowned-upon-and-untraditional right, called an assembly of the people and got his bill passed with the people’s enthusiastic approval. Equally as uncommon were for senatorial elites to orchestrate a veto of such a popular measure, but that the Senate did, co-opting one of the other nine Tribunes to veto Gracchus’ bill. Quite dramatically, Gracchus convened another assembly and had the people vote that tribune out of office: this dramatic move was extremely unprecedented, but was very likely still legal. The elites opposed to Gracchus were shocked at this move, and began a public relations campaign suggesting the Gracchus was out to make himself a king—just as offensive a suggestion to Roman sensibilities then as it would be to Americans today—and a portrayal Gracchus played into when he appointed himself and two of his relatives as the three-person commission to oversee the land reform. The Senate’s response to this was to refuse to allocate funding for Gracchus’s commission (if this sounds familiar to current U.S. politics on anything from Obamacare to the Zika virus, it should). In turn, Gracchus moved to get funding from future revenue from newly bestowed Pergamese lands in Asia, stepping into both financial and foreign affairs, policy spheres traditionally run by the Senate.

In pursuing his land reform and in its efforts to stop him at any cost, both Gracchus and the Senate were showing a willingness to discard centuries of compromise and precedent that had served Rome well, though Gracchus could at least in part be said to be acting on behalf of a Roman people and Republic in desperate need of land reform while the primary concern of the senatorial class was preserving their own power and obscene wealth. 

Against such odds, Gracchus did something no Roman as a tribune had ever done before: he made it clear he would stand for election again to serve a consecutive second term as a tribune, signaling to the Senate that it could not just stall in the hopes of outlasting him or hope to simply overturn his legislation when he was gone. A group of Senators, in part feeling this was a major step towards Gracchus moving to make himself king, and obviously acting to preserve their own power and wealth, marched on an assembly of the people where Gracchus was present and beat him, and hundreds of his supporters, to death; afterwards, other supporters of his were executed, imprisoned, or exiled without trial.

*****

This was a terrible turn for Rome: for hundreds of years and not since the earliest days of the Republic had anything even remotely like this happened, and even then nothing remotely this bad: tribunes were as a matter of religion sacrosanct and inviolable; to try to harm one was considered a terrible sacrilege. Elites, even members of the Senate, had resorted to settling a political dispute with mass murder, killing a major elected office-holder. And from this point, Rome’s politics would be driven by two main parties: the optimates—self-dubbed “best-men” who were the conservative leaders of the aristocracy and the Senate and generally acted against reform or anything that would redice their wealth and power—and populares—bold men from within the aristocracy who were willing to challenge the optimates, drawing support from the people with populist programs aimed helping the masses—and the conflict between the two would eventually destroy republican government in Rome altogether.

In order to prevent mass unrest, however, the Senate let much of Gracchus’ land law stand, but this was a temporary measure and the Senate stopped the reform in 129, to the dismay of not only Roman citizens; at this point, much of Italy was not so much directly controlled by Rome as by other Italians whom Rome considered allies and were not legally full Roman citizens, and it was clear to all that these Italians were the junior partners in the relationship; these Italians had not been consulted on the ending of the reform, to their consternation. This provided an opportunity for the murdered Gracchus’ younger brother, Gaius, who, it seems, sought to gain their support when they were shut out of the decision-making process by the Senate, apparently by supporting a bid to make many of them full Roman citizens. 

But when Gaius sought and won a tribunate for the year 123, this was only one of his many aims; he also ran for and won the tribunate for the next year, 122, without the cataclysmic reaction suffered by his brother for attempting the same thing. 

If Tiberius could be thought of as something of a Bernie Sanders of ancient Rome, then Gaius was going to take more of a Hillary Clinton-like approach, trying to build a broad coalition designed to appeal to many swaths of society instead of a more narrow populist program and to make it harder for the optimates to brush him aside like they did his brother. 

As such, Gaius Gracchus passed a law ensuring access to grain for bread to win over the urban poor; for the poor of the countryside, he suggested creating a new colony to settle people on the site where Carthage had once stood, in Africa; for an emerging middle-class of lower aristocrats and businessmen known as equites (who ran many of the publicani), he allowed them to bid for the lucrative tax-collecting contracts in the western parts of Pergamum’s former lands, now organized as the new Roman province of Asia (taxation was not undertaken directly by the government but was a task the Roman state contracted out to private companies); to this end, rather than have the bidding take place as would normally happen in the province itself (often abused by whichever Roman governor was there), Gracchus made sure it would take place in Rome, and instead of than splitting the taxation responsibilities for the province of Asia into multiple contracts, he made it a single contract for the whole province, an appeal to the support of the upper Roman business-class since only larger corporations could handle a contract on that scale (this move would have unintended blowback as it gave rise to the obscene growth in power of the publicani that would be such a huge problem for Romans decades later). 

On the legal front, he ensured capital trials could only be conducted through a law or people’s assembly, preventing the Senate from conducting trials by decree, and any senator or official who tried to bypass this restriction was subject to prosecution. He also brought equites into juries, so that the dominant portion of the pool from which judges and jurors in most civil cases were drawn were now equites over senators by a two-to-one margin; additionally, one of his allies passed a bill that made equites total replacements for senators on the juries of extortion courts that tried provincial governors and other senatorial-level officials for corruption (senators had generally avoided convicting their peers), and a permanent extortion court was established.

But in casting such a wide net, Gracchus made himself vulnerable as well; his wily Senatorial opponents used his effort to help Rome’s Italian allies against him, convincing many Romans that extending citizenship to these people would weaken the power of Roman citizens themselves, and the senators also used their individual patron-client ties with many of the non-Roman Italian to keep a good number of them from supporting Gracchus. They also preempted his attempt to win over the rural poor by having two of their own put forth bills to establish colonies. His support apparently undercut, Gaius lost an election in which he ran for a newly-unprecedented third tribunate in a row, and a fight broke out between some of his supporters and those of one of the current consuls, a consul who had bitterly opposed Gracchus and was a personal enemy of his; the fight resulted in the death of one of the consul’s supporters.

The Senate’s response to this was swift and unprecedented: it passed an emergency decree against Gracchus, authorizing the consul to do anything whatsoever to take Gracchus down: Gracchus and thousands of his followers were killed in a brief yet bloody fight and subsequent executions.

From the Gracchi to Caesar: the Cycle of Political Violence Explodes Into Civil War

Sadly, violence would come with frightening ease and regularity over the following decades.

Close to four centuries had passed in Roman history without violent episodes other than some disturbances early in Rome’s history, but after the deaths of the Gracchi brothers in 133 and 121, violence increasingly became a political tool, beginning mainly with the Senate’s optimates’ efforts to squash would-be reformers challenging their power too much for their liking, first in 100 and again in 91, both used against tribunes and the latter being used on a man pushing for citizenship for Rome’s Italian allies; the assassination of their champion sparked a rebellion by many of Rome’s Italian allies called the Social War (91-88), which was only ended by Rome’s granting of most of them the citizenship they had wanted to achieve through peaceful means. But an actual civil war between roman military units fighting for supporters of one generally popularis consul (Gaius Marius) against the forces and supporters of another optimas consul (Lucious Cornelius Sulla)—Rome’s first civil war in over four centuries of republican government (consider it took the United States only 85 years before it had its Civil War from 1861-1865)—broke out the same year (along with a major overseas conflict in Greece and Asia). The period of conflict between supporters of Marius and Sulla would not finally end until 72 (and that foreign war not ending until 63). 

But no rest for the weary: one ambitious popularis tried to overthrow the Republic after losing an election in 61, and he and his makeshift army were annihilated in 62. As the 50s unfolded, tension was constant and bouts of mob violence frequent, while the many pressing problems facing the Republic were left unaddressed by obstinate optimates who showed a total disregard for the Roman people. (Gaius) Julius Caesar would be their champion as a popularis, but his foes in the Senate would never forgive him; with a veteran army after his victorious war in Gaul, the Senate issued its emergency decree again in 49, basically authorizing tCaesar’s death because he would not step down from office; but this was after intense behind the scenes maneuvering in which Caesar’s supporters tried to negotiate a way for him to take up a new office when his term as consul expired, without which Cesar would be out of office and therefore open to legal prosecution, which his enemies were certainly planning for him. Essentially, they were daring Caesar to start a civil war or accept disgrace and prosecution and who-knows-what-punishment, in addition to an untenable political situation for the Republic and its citizens.

Caesar chose civil war.

By the time the wars which grew out of the civil war beginning in 49 ended nearly twenty years later in 30 with Caesar’s nephew Octavian defeating Mark Antony and Cleopatra, Rome’s people were so exhausted by war that they didn’t mind that Octavian set up a dictatorship masquerading as a republic, and thus the Roman emperorship was born. There would not be another large-scale democracy or democratic republic with as much participation by the people until the United States of America grew to be a major power roughly 1,800 years later.

America’s Own Problems With Political Violence: Civil War to Civil Rights

Harper’s Weekly- October 19th, 1872

That time would roughly coincide with America’s Civil War. The war itself did not really end in 1865: during Reconstruction, the Republican-dominated federal government with its army acting as an occupying force put into place new state governments in the Southern states that had rebelled that enforced racial political and legal equality for freed slaves, but over the course of the next decade and then some, Democratic extremist terrorist white supremacists carried out insurgencies and violently overthrew almost all these governments, putting in place racist governments highly oppressive and violent to black Americans that lasted until the 1960s; southern whites finally negotiated the withdrawal of federal troops left in the only remaining states southern white insurgents had not violently taken over after the disputed election of 1876, an election, like so many others between 1865-1876, marred in the South by widespread violence, fraud, and voter suppression.

Harper’s weekly- “Of Course He Wants to Vote the Democratic Ticket:” White Democrats intimidate a black Republican,October 21st, 1876

With the exception of the election of 1948, in which many southern whites punished Democratic incumbent Harry S. Truman for supporting civil rights for African-Americans and voted for racist third-party candidate Strom Thurmond, Democrats would continue to be the party of racists until John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson embraced equality for African-Americans in the 1960s, causing the parties to swap positions on issues of race, with white southern voters then defecting en masse to the Republican Party mainly because of racism, where they are now the Republican Party’s primary base. And, disturbingly, most of the states where today the state-level government is leading the charge in suppressing black and other minority voters are former “Confederate” states in the South.

America is fortunate that apart from riots and strikes, many of them race-based, there has been very few period of civil unrest since the 1870s, the main exceptions being the sporadic taming of the “Wild West” and later the Civil Rights Era’s 1960s and early 70s. But now, starting with the Ferguson riots in 2014 that was the first in a series episodes of racial unrest that have so far culminated in the dark days of racial tension of this very summer of 2016, we are seeing the most unrest this country has faced in more than 40 years.

Trump: The First Major Party Candidate to Stoke Unrest While Running for President?

And in the middle of all this is Donald Trump, the most polarizing major-party candidate since the election of 1860 that precipitated this country’s only civil war.

As history and even our own world today amply demonstrates, the sinister genie of political violence is prohibitively difficult to get back into its bottle once it has been unleashed; often, the attempt to rebottle it fails to succeed before the self-destruction of whatever state-structures were in existence, or before people turn to autocracy out of weariness of violence, with the violence itself often bred by a disintegrating public trust in major institutions. Most worrisome about Trump is that he is mixing subtle, implied threats of mass violence and/or intimidation with a very overt effort to obliterate trust in such institutions; just to recap, from the beginning of his candidacy and throughout, Trump falsely exaggerated how bad problems were with our institutions, even allowing for their increasingly problematic nature: first, he assailed the media and the party presidential nomination process as being “rigged” by elites to keep him down (that is, until he won and then stopped caring); added to this are his repeated allegations that the presidential voting system is rigged from top to bottom, with exhortations of his (largely white) supporters to be enthusiastic volunteer Election Day poll-watchers (in minority-heavy precincts), a task that only trained professionals are qualified to do (the parts in parentheses are understood even as candidate Trump does not emphasize them). Combined with his casual references to beating up dissenters at his rallies, his earlier threats/hints of possible violence (and his campaign’s preparations for intimidation tactics) were the Republican Party to try to deny Trump the nomination at its convention, his repeated musings as to what gun enthusiasts could show Hillary Clinton, especially if she were to be stripped of her Secret Service protection, and his stated desire to put Clinton in jail were he to be elected president along with his encouraging of chants of “lock her up” with crowds at his rallies, all Americans paying attention who have any sense of decency left should be feeling chills down their spines.

And yet for millions of Trump’s deplorable supporters, who are hanging on to every word in person at mass rallies, watching him on TV, or listening to him on the radio, they hear all this, easily understand all the implied subtleties about race and violence, and eagerly absorb every word joyfully, salivating at the very prospect of being able to assert their white dominance yet again on the political system, with far too many of these people also delighting in the prospect of political violence as a means to achieve these ends.

I wish I could say that I firmly believe such a prospect of political violence on anything other than a minute scale is a remote possibility, but I can’t; Trump’s recently far more sinister rhetorical turn is driving delusions and fantasies of violence in the heads of far, far too many of his flock, especially if that recent poll that had half of Republicans refusing to accept Clinton as president is even remotely accurate (and it probably is). I honestly don’t know what will happen, so extreme has Trump’s rhetoric become, so extreme have the views of many of his supporters been for some time, that I fear what will happen should this toxic mix boil over.

All Americans, regardless of political affiliation, in an atmosphere of increasing racial animosity and rumblings of political violence, should be afraid, and demand that Trump cease such rhetoric immediately, before it may be too late to prevent the unimaginable. But, as a consequence of all of this, we must begin to imagine the unimaginable, and prepare for the worst.

In some ways, that in itself is close enough to a 133 moment that we are in trouble regardless of what happens on and/or after Election Day.

Conclusion: A True Test for America, Its System, Its Leaders, Its People 

I want to also be careful here to note I am not arguing inevitability here: 133 did not make Sulla’s and Caesar’s civil wars inevitable, and Trump doesn’t make anything inevitable about today’s America. But each made and make, respectively, the possibility of really bad things happening far more likely: once such things occur in a society, they are far more likely to occur again than if society had prevented them from occurring at all in the first place.

Do I think Trump really wants to spark violence and riots? To undermine democracy? Maybe not, maybe it’s just bravado, but maybe not; either way, I do not think he appreciates or understands the raw hatred and emotion with which he is toying; in fact, the Republican Party did not realize how dangerous a game they were playing for decades stoking these fires, and Trump blew it all up right in the Party’s elites’ face. These forces are larger than Trump, and it remains to be seen if he can contain them, or if he even wants to. At the final debate, he said he wanted to keep us “in suspense,” and no matter what happens, we can all agree he has succeeded wildly on that front, and not for the good of our republic. The example of Rome’s self-destructive descent into civil political violence and strife is frighteningly instructive for our times, then, and should give us all pause, and we will have to judge ourselves very much on the basis of what happens over the next few weeks. In some ways, no less than the fate of our (and even Western) democracy itself is at stake.

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The worst thing about Trump? Globally, people like him and his supporters are everywhere and their politics maddeningly banal, as the ethno-centric politics of hate in the Caucasian Republic of Georgia demonstrate frightening similarities to the same politics in the Unites States of America.

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse October 10, 2016  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) October 10th, 2016

Patrick Robert/Corbis/Getty; EPA

AMMAN — Amid all the talk of the issue of the “normalization” of Trump, perhaps the most disheartening realization that comes to those who ponder such a concept is in how many ways how utterly banal are figures like Trump and the movement he is cultivating/exploiting, both in the wider world and throughout history. Georgia—the Republic of, in the Caucasus, not the one of peaches, the Atlanta Braves, and America’s Deep South—is as illustrative of this sad reality of the human condition as any other place, and is thus deeply relevant to understanding our own predicament with Mr. Trump and his fans.

To illustrate this point, I will steal from my own graduate school work in 2009 on conflict in Georgia involving Georgians, Abkhaz, Ossetians, and Russians, inserted in italicized blocs (apologies for all the parenthetical citations as we had a very strict and I would argue frustrating series of guidelines; here is the full paper). 

As will be demonstrated, much of Georgian history involves internal and external forces managing the relationships between ethnic Georgians on one hand and ethnic Abkhaz and ethnic Ossetians and others on the other in what can loosely be understood to be Georgian territory and in what comprises the internationally recognized borders of Georgia today. Since 1800, Russia dominated the country and has been nearly the sole major outside actor involved in these ethnic conflicts, and in recent years has acted to allow both Abkhazia and South Ossetia to become de facto independent from Georgia and to become de facto parts of the Russian Federation. After the period of the rule of the Czars over the Russian Empire ended, the ethnic minorities in Georgia competed for favor and power to be bestowed from the Soviet Union’s governing elites, elites whose behavior ranged from accommodating ethnic Georgian nationalism to addressing concerns of minorities in Georgia as a way to check Georgian nationalism when it became too anti-Russian/anti-Soviet (something which continued after the fall of the USSR up through today).

Much of American history, likewise, is the story of race relations between white masters and black slaves in the South and the relationship between the rest of the country and the South when it came to limiting the institution of slavery. Since 1865, slavery ended in America but attempts at legal and political equality for freed slaves in the South failed in the face of a terrorist insurgency that finally succeeded in overthrowing the post-Civil War order everywhere in the South by 1877. It was not until a long period of first oppression and later unrest that legal and political equality for African-Americans was imposed on the South by an activist U.S. federal government by 1965.

Creating Identities

“The creation legend of Abkhazia and Georgia is identical, a sad fact that has not led to unity and fraternity between these two peoples,” writes Goltz (2009), “but rather to a disputation of basic history and the denial of the very humanity of the other group” (Goltz 2009, 21). For most of its history, Georgia had a stronger eastern kingdom which dominated a weaker western Georgian kingdom, and Abkhazia (then called Abkhazeti) was often ruled by a local prince who might submit to another prince or one of the Georgian kings, or might not, and managed to stay free, and eventually grew in power into its own kingdom, supplanting the west Georgian state and rivaling the east Georgian kingdom for several centuries until the latter unified both into a single Georgian kingdom in 1008 C.E. (Suny 1994, 11-33; Braund 1994, 152-313; Rapp 2000, 576; Gvosdev 2000,1). This kingdom would be a “decidedly decentralized state,” where local rulers often flouted the authority of the “kings” and reached out to foreign powers independently for leverage against them, some trying to take the throne (Suny 1994, 33- 38). Through the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Georgia “remained…primarily rural” and its “towns…were largely inhabited by Muslims, Armenians, and other foreigners” until the nineteenth century (Ibid., 38-39). Mongols and plague fragmented Georgia, and Abkhazeti was one of three western regions “ruled as semi-independent” principalities; Georgia would not see reunification “until the annexation by Russia in the nineteenth century” (Suny 1994, 38-59; Gvosdev 2000, 2-5).”

Note how divided and difficult to control the region was.

“Because, arguably, interests are tied to identities,” writes Suny (1999), “self-understandings… must be investigated as prerequisite to analyzing the security requirements of states” (Suny 1999, 139- 140). Georgia is among certain former Soviet states where “uncertainty about current politics and future possibilities are deeply embedded in more general confusion about who ‘we‘ are and where ‘our‘ interests lie” and he writes that “[n]ational identity is a particular form of political identification” in a world where “nation is not natural or given but must be worked for, taught, and instilled, largely through the efforts of intellectuals, politicians, and activists who make the identification with the ‘imagined political community‘ of the nation a palpable and potent source of emotional and intellectual commitment” (Ibid., 140, 144-145). For Suny, “[m]odern nations are those political communities made up of people who believe they share characteristics…that give them the right to self-determination… they can be thought of as arenas in which people dispute who they are, argue about boundaries, who is in or who is out of the group, where the ‘homeland‘ begins and ends, what the ‘true‘ history of the nation is” (Suny 1999, 145; 4 Suny 2001, 866). He argues that many wars in the modern era are fought over such issues, and that “longlived ‘nations,‘ [like]…Georgians… who have written traditions that go back millennia, have in modern times reconstructed and made consistent the varied and changing identities and ways of conceiving themselves that existed in the past;” “earlier identities” have been molded into “frame[s] of later templates, particularly that of the nation” (Suny 1999, 146). He describes Georgia as one of several former Soviet Republics where “the problems of ethnicity, identity, and the appropriate political forms to sustain the new state in the future were at the base of the devastating and violent crises that fractured” them (Suny 1999, 154). For Suny (1994), Georgia is “reinventing its past;” and “[t]the key to the future lies in what a people selects from its past, how it imagines itself as a community and continues to remake itself as a nation” (Suny 1994, 334-335).

Several authors besides Suny articulate a similar position, that the intensely-felt ancient identities of the Georgians and the Abkhaz are important components to understanding their modern struggles conflicts with each other. Grant (2009) comments that these ancient Abkhaz and Georgian identities were so strongly felt that Russia “never entirely convinced…[these people] that they were full partners alongside the rest” of the Russian Empire and the USSR, and Georgia‘s current President, Mikheil Saakashvili, “took a holy oath” as part of his presidential inauguration ceremony at Gelati, where the “greatest Georgian king of the eleventh century…is buried. By receiving the blessing at Gelati, Saakashvili, who wants a strong Georgian state, was symbolically alluding to a period of history when Georgia had such a state” (Grant 2009, ix-x; Nodia 2005, 78).

On the use of history in this debate, Zverev (1996) notes that it is a “salient factor” in understanding “why conflicts break out,” that “in Abkhaz literature, one finds references to the Abkhazian kingdom which existed in the 9th and 10th centuries. This is instrumental to the Abkhazian claim for sovereignty over the region even though the same kingdom could equally be described as a common Georgian-Abkhazian state, with a predominance of Georgian language and culture;” he points out that on the other side, Georgians “stress the allegedly non-Abkhaz character” of the historical Abkhazia, and that some even think of Georgians as “hosts” and that everyone else, including Abkhaz, are “guests” in Georgian territory (Zverev 1996, part I par.7). This debate, for Zverev as it was for Suny, is about presenting a case for who has the right to govern where and over whom, and this representation of the debate is also corroborated by the recent EU report on the August 2008 war (2009), by Khazanov (1996), by the International Crisis Group (ICG) (2006), and by Nodia (1998) (EURII, 66-69; Khazanov 1996, 6; ICG 2006, 3-4; Nodia 1998, 14). Nodia sums up Georgian views: “Abkhazia is Georgia, because it has always been part of Georgia when it was united. Georgians cannot see Abkhazia as a ‘foreign‘ land which was once conquered by them, and the accusation of imperialism usually makes them furious” (Nodia 1998, 19). Jans (1998) sums up the intersection of Georgian and Abkhazian thought, in that after the Cold War they were engaged in a quest for identity since “[d]emocracy, understood as the rule of the people by the people, begs the question of what is to be understood as ‘We, the people.‘“ (Jans 1998, 109) He further argues that “Ethnonational identities base their credibility and legitimacy on an interpretation of the historical past;” so for Georgians and Abkhazians, the past is of very present relevance to them (Ibid., 110). Lynch (2002) says that Abkhaz claims to the right of self-determination are, among other things, “based” on the idea that modern Abkhazia can claim to be the latest incarnation of “a long historical tradition;” he then quotes Abkhazia‘s foreign minister as saying “Abkhazia has a thousand-year history of statehood since the formation in the 8th century of the Kingdom of Abkhazia. Even within the framework of empires, Abkhazia kept this history of stateness. No matter the form, Abkhaz statehood remained intact” (Lynch 2002, 837). Departing from the more neutral posture of others, Chirikba (1998), writing as an Abkhaz government official, argues that Abkhaz history shows more independence from Georgians than not, and thus provides its people with “legitimate grounds for their claims to statehood and sovereignty” (Chirikba 1998, 48).”

Now, if some of this sounds familiar, it should: for much of American history, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants constructed an American identity that was based on their supposed superiority over other whites—Irish, Eastern and Southern Europeans—in addition to Africans and others, and defined being true “Americans” as their exclusive domain, working actively to frame these other groups as non-Americans and undeserving of the same rights, if any. Over time the different whites generally unified when it came to ethnic politics and redefined “American” as being white, which over much of the last century meant seeking to exclude blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and other non-whites from sharing in the spoils of being an “American.”

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Perceptions of Meddling

“Areshidze posits the theory that the Soviet “system of ethnic autonomies was…in reality…a time bomb that Moscow could blow up at its leisure by pushing the ‘protected‘ minorities towards separatism. Thus, this situation gave Moscow a means to weaken and destabilize” Georgia; Zürcher (2005) echoes this analysis (Areshidze 2007, 22; Zürcher 2005, 99). Castells (1996) claims that “the strong development of nationalism in the post-communist period can be related…to the cultural emptiness created by 70 years of imposition of an exclusionary ideological entity, coupled with the return to primary, historical identity (Russian, Georgian), as the only source of meaning after the crumbling of the historically fragile sovietskii narod” (Soviet people) (Castells 1996, 24). Eventually all these trends culminated on the Georgian side with the idea that “their further evolution was hindered by the restraints placed on them by the Russians. An attitude arose that, left to themselves, the Georgians could more quickly realize their historical potential;” “the erosion of Marxist ideology within the Soviet Union cleared the way for its replacement” by the forces already pent up even before Stalin and released after him. Released, they “produced an increasingly potent nationalist mood in all parts of Georgian society—and counternationalism among the ethnic minorities within the republic;” this in turn “stimulated a rapid escalation of ethnic politics in Georgia;” “[t]he specific goals of Soviet nationality policy, the rapprochement and eventual merging of nationalities, were further from realization in the 1980s than they had been at any time in Soviet history” (Suny 1994, 313-316, 320-321; Remington 1989, 145).

Such Georgian views are remarkably similar to those of many conservative white Americans: if the federal government would just get out of the way, they would be free to realize their full potential, and they deeply resent and oppose federal efforts to protect minority rights or to divert any common resources specifically in the direction of minorities; for these white Americans, this is taking what is “theirs” as “true Americans” as they define that concept and they seek to exclude or place limits on other groups that they view as less “American” and worthy than themselves. For them, their concept of their own freedom involves their ability to restrict the freedoms of others as they please. 

It was no coincidence that the election of a black President—America’s first non-white president—who campaigned heavily on giving poor uninsured people (the way conservative whites incorrectly read it: non-white) healthcare gave rise to the Tea Party which was in many ways white nationalism run amok (one only has to look at the many polls and multiple studies that showed that huge numbers of Tea Partiers thought Obama was a Muslim, doubted he was a Christian, believed he was not born in America, and had more prejudicial, insensitive, and extreme views on racial issues than most Americans, even when compared to non-Tea Party conservatives); those Tea party forces have morphed into the Trump movement, which has taken over the Republican Party, one of two major political parties in America, and clearly those people now carry the same noxious and extreme views on race that they did when they were members of the Tea Party; in fact, racial concerns seem to be the largest motivators behind people choosing to support Trump: in other words, Trump is the candidate of white ethno-centrist nationalism in America.

Weaponizing History

Suny (2001) claims that Soviet policy created a tendency for ethnic groups like Georgians and Abkhaz to invent imaginary histories that can bolster “the legitimacy of the nation and particular claims to territory and statehood” while at the same time becoming become “exclusivist” and encouraging “desperate policies of deportation and ethnic cleansing” (Suny 2001, 895-896). The EU report concludes that in the atmosphere discussed, there was “no political framework that would have been strong enough to integrate the conflicting national demands” (EURII 2009, 63). Violence, war, and revolution would soon erupt as Soviet rule ended in Georgia.

One only need to look at how conservatives in America, particularly in the South, have created a fantasy about the Civil War that they maintain to this day: Lincoln was a tyrant while the South was bravely fighting for freedom and small government, despite a clear and overwhelming preponderance of evidence that, without question, slavery and white supremacy were at the heart of the Civil War—were actually its primary drivers—and at the heart of the ideology of the self-styled “Confederate States of America.” White ethno-centrists even try to force textbooks into public schools that downplay the issue of slavery, minimize discussion of racial oppression, and falsely frame America’s founding in a Christian context. Georgians and Abkhaz and others fight among themselves over their founding myths and over their histories, trying to distort and weaponize history as a way to delegitimize certain groups and assert exclusivity over this or that, but Americans are clearly no different.

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Zero-Sum Mentalities on Minorities: Identity and the Meaning of Independence

“Many Georgian nationalists are apprehensive of minorities like Ossetians and Abkhaz having too much autonomy and see this as a threat to Georgia; it was ethnic Georgian protests against the Abkhaz request for separation from Georgia in 1989 which sparked the rapid acceleration of Zviad Gamsakhurdia’s nationalist, anti-ethnic minority agenda and “radicalized” Georgian nationalism; it became more belligerent towards perceived threats from minorities, especially Ossetians and Abkhaz” (Suny 1994, 317-323; Zürcher 2005, 90). For Devdariani (2005) Gamsakhurdia and his movement “perceived Abkhazia and South Ossetia as simply tools for Russian pressure directed against Georgian independence… “[C]oncerns of [their] local elites…[were ignored and]…tensions spiraled into violent clashes…[They failed] to see how…[their] own quest for independence challenged the identities of the Abkhazians and Ossetians” (Devdariani 2005, 161)…

Jones (2006), seeking to downplay ethnic tensions in favor of economic ones, disagrees that the protests were about Abkhazia and argues they were more about “Georgian independence,” but Jones still describes Gamsakhurdia as “using nationalist slogans to gain authority” and “manipulat[ing] a formerly moderate Georgian populace into a chauvinistic mob;” Zürcher maintains with others that the Abkhazian call for secession “led” to the protest (Jones 2006, 257; Zürcher 2005, 89). The EU report and Zürcher take care to mention Georgians, especially those in Abkhazia, saw concessions to minorities as too generous, and that this explains the rise of leaders like Zviad Gamsakhurdia (EURII 2009, 69; Zürcher 2005, 89)

When ethnic minorities tried/try to assert themselves in America, there was/is almost always a hostile backlash from the white majority, and these backlashes are often violence and can take on a form of terrorism. This was the plight the Irish faced as famously depicted in the Scorcese’s Gangs of New York, and of freed slaves who suffered at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan in the aftermath of the Civil War and for a century after, and violence spiked again when they asserted themselves in the later 1950s and 1960s. Today, with racial, gender, and sexual orientation movements, there has never been a more diverse array of loud assertions of minority groups for their deserved place in public and private life, and the discourse is richer and more diverse than it has ever been as a result. But with the rise of the Tea Party and Trump after the election of a black president and the codification of homosexual marriage as a right protected by the Constitution (both good things), with the yet further proliferation of oversensitivity, an extreme form of politically correct discourse, and complaints of microaggressions (no so much good things), we are seeing a major backlash and Donald Trump’s rise to a height of just a few percentage-points of votes away from the presidency is the face and spirit of that backlash. Many of Trump’s supporters look at groups like blacks, Hispanics, and the LGBT community as tools for an unholy alliance between such groups and a liberal activist federal government—led by a black president they generally believe is a foreign-born Muslim—that these whites perceive has come to oppress them in order to favor brown people and gays and non-Christians (more or less non-Americans to them). Hence, we have whites chanting All Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter in response to the Black Lives Matter movement, with many whites condemning Black Lives Matter and some even trying to frame it as a terrorist group; too many and too often, whites feel they must have a virtual monopoly on group victimhood and cannot stomach the idea of recognizing and legitimizing the grievances of other groups.

Trump is therefore in many ways just America’s Zviad Gamsakhurdia. And it should be noted that Gamsakurdia propelled his country onto a path of ethnic hatred and violence that led to civil war. I don’t think Trump would push America into a civil war, but, as I’ve noted before, I do see America at an already dangerously high level of racial tension and violence not seen since the Civil Rights Era half a century earlier, with the one major exception being the 1992 L.A. riots, and I do see American society becoming far more divided than it is even now should Trump be at the helm, and view Trump as a danger to Western democracy. 

Still, it is clear that the nativism and ethno-centrism that are driving today’s Republican Party and have handed it to Trump are parts of a longstanding American tradition, best exemplified by the “Know-Nothings” for which Abraham Lincoln harbored such disdain, Southern Civil-War slaver secessionists and Redeemers, and George Wallace’s movement from the Civil Rights Era. And, as in Georgia, these often regional movements are both about hostility towards other ethnicities and about independence, and independence from a federal government perceived almost as a foreign power and from a foreign power for the U.S. and Georgia, respectively. Such a concept of independence is tied to spheres both public and private that are seen to be contested with these other ethnicities in a landscape that has long been ethnically and/or racially polarized.

In America, people, locations, and states that are very anti-federal government hardly look at what they deem interference from Washington—in particular from Democrats, and in particular from the African-American-led Obama Administration—differently from how Georgian chauvinists look(ed) at Russian/Soviet efforts to accommodate Abkhaz and other minorities in Georgia; likewise, minorities in America have long looked to the federal government to establish and protect their rights against a white majority that, to varying degrees depending on location, has often sought and still seeks to infringe or even outright destroy those rights, much like Abkhaz and Ossetians have appealed to Soviet/Russian authority to protect them from abuses at the hands of Georgians.

A most salient case-in-point in America involves recent controversies in North Carolina; as one of the states that had used state laws to institutionalize the oppression of African-Americans until 1965, the U.S. Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) had included North Carolina along with a number of states and localities in a list of places—mostly in the South—that had to receive “preclearance” from federal authorities before changing any of its voting laws, with this preclearance provision on component of an effort to prevent the re-disenfranchisement of black voters. This system worked quite well until 2013, when the narrowly conservative U.S. Supreme Court issue a partisan 5-4 ruling that basically said the VRA was no longer needed and that it constituted federal oppression of state sovereignty. Almost immediately after the Supreme Court ruling, North Carolina was one of several states that enacted controversial restrictive voting laws under Republican leadership. These laws were criticized to varying degrees as thinly veiled attempt to suppress the votes of African-Americans, and at the end of August of this year, that is just what the federal court system decided: a federal appeals court had ruled that the North Carolina law sought to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision” and struck it down as unconstitutional, and the U.S. Supreme Court in a 4-4 partisan tie issued on August 31st (with a vacant seat since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, perhaps the most conservative justice on the Court) was unable to alter this decision (but almost certainly would have had Scalia been alive; a close call indeed).

Thus, as American Republican right-wing white ethno-centrist nationalists seeks to curb and flout federal authority and prodding on many issues related to minorities, from accepting refugees and affirmative action to voting rights and Medicaid expansion to LBGT rights and imposing sectarian religious agendas, so Georgian ethno-nationalists long sought to fight Soviet/Russian attempts to protect and ensure minority rights for Abkhaz and Ossetians. Georgia has been a part of the Russian Empire for over 200 year until the end of the Cold War, so though this involves two separate sovereign nations today, many of the dynamics still resemble those of Russian/Soviet intranational politics; conversely, the South of the United States experimented with secession as a unit from 1861-1865 and tried to form its own nation, an experiment which failed miserably but which still helps to explain why the South above all other regions of the United States exhibits a staunch resistance to the rest of the national will and to attempts by the U.S. federal government to bring it along with other national projects, from segregation to the ACA (Obamacare) and any of a whole host of other items.

As in the case with Georgia, at the heart of all this tension are ethnic tensions between those in a majority that see any concession to minorities as a loss of their “rightful” power and societal position on one hand and ethnic minorities that depend on outside forces for protection from outright oppression and domination at the hands those in that majority on the other. And, much as Trump is galvanizing a backlash in minority consciousness and activism in America, so, too, did Gamsakhurdia galvanize Abkhazians and others to resist him.

Conclusion: All Politics Is Local (Exclusion of “The Other?”)

The bottom line is that the sad identity politics of hate and division and resentment are hardly anything exceptional in America and can be found all over the world throughout history and up through today, from Burma to Turkey, from Israel to Burundi, from France to Syria. Americans can only hope that Trump is not nearly as successful as Gamsakhurdia and that America will not follow Georgia in fracturing itself over ethnic hatred. Even if it manages to stave off such a scenario, that will only be a starting point for much needed healing and mending of racial and ethnic fences.

On a final note: Russia at one point gave military support to Gamsakhurdia, after he had been overthrown, as a way to weaken Georgia’s overall position before turning on him after Russia had wrested concessions from the new Georgian leadership. Trump might be interested in such history, with Putin’s Russia today interfering in America’s election and trying to help Donald Trump get into the White House.

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 (you can follow him there at @bfry1981), and here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content, or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse August 10, 2016 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) August 10th, 2016

Matt Slocum/AP

AMMAN — As the story swirling around the Russian-hacked, Wikileaks-released body of e-mails from seven staffers of the Democratic National Committee (abbreviated as DNC and the braintrust/leadership organization for the Democratic Party) unfolded just before and during the Democratic National Convention, it came to light that some of these staffers had discussed Bernie Sanders in a critical manner and discussed ways to bring negative attention to his candidacy.

Cue one of the most overblown “scandals” in recent memory.

Much Ado About Nothing

A point lost in much of the commentary surrounding the leaked e-mails is that, rather than show any kind of specific smoking gun, they either showed explicit instructions not to act on these ideas/discussions or failed to provide any evidence that they were acted upon.

The e-mails are basically internal musings of private individuals working for a private organization, much like thoughts in a person’s head bouncing around but with something along the lines of telepathic communication at work between several individuals. Like any groupings of individual e-mails as part of any public or private organization, they don’t represent the organization as a whole or its official policy, but represent private discussions of private individuals who do work for the organization but are simply expressing private thoughts not meant for public consumption that nevertheless do represent their thoughts as individuals within a massive organization, yet we don’t know if they are meant to be 100% serious or more tongue-in-cheek than anything else, whether they are joking or maybe just playing devil’s advocate for something they’d like to see but know won’t ever materialize; basically, we know far, far less about the e-mails than what the people involved know, but they seem to give us a window into glimpsing the thought process of several DNC staffer, nothing more, nothing less. Sure, questions are raised, but drawing firm conclusions from these e-mails that there was any substantive action taken against Bernie Sanders and his campaign is not possible.

But such details and many others were lost in much of the media coverage and on the many, many Bernie Sanders supporters who ranged from leaning toward believing in an anti-Bernie conspiracy to “knowing” in their hearts that there was one, as they now “knew” they had the information they needed to give solid form to their dark, brooding thoughts, to lose it and go absolutely ballistic on the DNC, the Democratic Party, and Hillary Clinton.

Both the absurdity and the petulance of this genuine yet myopic outrage deserves to examined in detail.

Non-Democrat Tries to Take Over Democrats & They Don’t Like It… YAWN

First of all, I must, again, quote a friend of mine and his pithy yet spot-on social media post in which he wrote “so, lemme get this straight: some staffers from a national political committee expressed personal political opinions on their work email? ok, gotcha.” Perhaps Sanders supporters feel this is being unfairly dismissive, but as someone who has been a registered Democrat for my entire adult life, I beg to differ. For one thing, the vast majority of Clinton’s votes in the Democratic primary came from registered Democrats who preferred her 64% to 35% for Sanders, while the vast majority of Sanders’ votes in the Democratic primary came from independents, who preferred him 64% to 34% for Clinton. Last time I checked, the Democratic Party was a well-defined private organization with its own beliefs and people, with the full rights and freedom to control its membership and participation and pathways to both in order to prevent outside people and influences from hijacking it. 

In fact, Bernie Sanders was not even calling himself a Democrat until he decided to run for president over a year ago. So, for one thing, everyone, including Bernie Sanders supporters, needs to admit that Bernie was declaring himself to be a Democrat not because he had suddenly discovered newfound love and appreciation for the Democratic Party, its politics, and its officials; no, the longest-serving independent member of Congress in American history—one who had very often run and campaigned (and campaigned hard) against Democrats—was very much and very cynically using the party’s national-level apparatus and organizational strength as a way to project his ideas, his approach, his candidacy, and himself in marked contrast and in opposition to said party. Sanders even made it clear in the middle of March of this year that he was doing just this, explicitly saying that he ran as a Democrat to get more media coverage and money, musing to his interviewer that this interviewer “would not have me on his program” if he was running as an independent and further musing:

“Look, here’s the truth. You’re right, I am the longest serving independent in the history of the United States Congress…Do you run as an independent? Do you run within the Democratic party? We concluded– and I think it was absolutely the right decision, that, A, in terms of media coverage– you have to run within the Democratic Party.

Number two, that to run as an independent, you need– you could be a billionaire. If you’re a billionaire, you can do that. I’m not a billionaire. So the structure of American politics today is such that I thought the right ethic was to run within the Democratic Party.”

Sanders even had to be intensely pressured by his inner circle to run as Democrat, something he really, really didn’t want to do, and not an independent, which was his initial plan, before his advisors insisted he do an about-face. Even today, his official Senate website proudly touts his career as an independent in the second sentence of his “About” page and labels him currently as an independent. His was to be a hostile takeover, whose very campaign was fueled by and defined by his longstanding disdain and contempt (even encouraging of hatred) for the Democratic Party and its standard bearer, Hillary Clinton. And even in the middle of the Democratic National Convention, Sanders announced that he would be returning to his work in the U.S. Senate not as a Democrat, but as an independent.

Thus, the undeniable truth is that while Sanders ran as a Democrat for not quite 15 full months (and he really only declared himself full a Democrat for not quite 9 of those months, doing so in November, in time to be eligible for the New Hampshire primary while also pledging to run in future elections as a Democrat, a pledge which he apparently just went back on in in claiming to be an independent again), he wanted to take over the Democratic Party rather than join it. That means that other than in a purely opportunist sense for these last 15 months and in no deeper sense at all over the course of his 25-year congressional career and of his overall 45-year political career has Bernie Sanders ever really been a Democrat. 

So while Sanders is perfectly within his rights to attempt a hostile takeover within certain bounds, the Democratic Party is also within its rights to protect itself, its interests, and its people from such a hostile takeover within certain bounds.

The Right to (Political) Self-Defense, in Praise of Political Elites, & the Limits of Democracy/”The People”

Does this Democratic Party, which had its own accustomed ideas and approaches different from those of Sanders, have a right to organize itself in such a way as to help prevent a hostile takeover? Of course it does, which is why a good chunk of primaries (including those of very populous and thus electorally important states like New York and Florida) are closed primaries, where only party members who have registered to be in a party well before the primary can vote in that party’s primary.

As Andrew Sullivan noted recently, too much democracy and too open a system actually creates fertile ground for tyranny and chaos. The Founding Fathers were explicit: the people were not to govern, but their representatives as chosen by them were. In the American system of government, political parties run by political elites familiar with the complex machinery of government play an important role in the running of a system that negotiates the many competing views and interests of any diverse, modern democracy, and just as their role should not eclipse and supplant that of the people, the role of the people should not eclipse and supplant this important role played by elites. 

This idea of balance is not anything new, and such balance between people and elites was what the ancient Greek writer Polybius saw as the secret to ancient Rome’s success over 2,000 years ago. Whether reading the ancient advocates of republican government or The Federalist Papers, it is clear that a dominant philosophy is one of checks and balances, with both the government and the people checking each other and themselves being seen as ideal; yes, the people, hardly infallible, need to have their power checked, too, no matter how angry that idea may make some. And if ever there was a time for elites and the system to check the often temporary, misguided will of the people in American electoral history, it is today with Trump as a serious contender.

In America, elites today are basically the only thing other than the Constitution that stand between at least the semblance of orderly governance on one side of the spectrum and, on the other side, a system that would “operate” much like a room full of many people with very divergent views arguing endlessly on an issue and finding they are unable to come to a collective decision save for the majority simply imposing its will on the minority: a Tocquevillian “tyranny of the majority.” As James Madison wrote in “Federalist No. 55,” “In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever character composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.” 

Doing away with political elites’ powers as gatekeepers and stewards for political party operations and nominations goes hand-in-hand with the process of those same elites’ role of performing the key negotiative function in the American political system becoming increasingly eclipsed by elites’ almost servile fidelity to the momentary whims of the masses, measured by ever more ubiquitous and frequent public opinion polls (polls that increasingly determine a politician’s course of action, rather than inform it). While such elites in America have tended to rely on support from diffuse interest groups and populations in the past, the more open electoral system of late has seen a move towards support from more vocal, passionate extremists, most recently characterized by the rise of the Tea Party, and, after that, Trumpism and Sandersism. With the backroom an increasingly rare space for deal-making and being replaced by a laser-focused public spotlight that leaves less flexibility and often loses sight of the bigger picture, posturing has come to be more and more a substitute for deal-making, the true essence of governing.

Fairness and Earned Advantages

An important role for political elites and party apparatuses doesn’t mean they should be able to do anything regardless of how their rank-and-file members feel and the public as a whole feels; it doesn’t mean that the party can, or should, make it impossible for major change, prevent new ideas and new candidates from competing, seek to formally disqualify new blood, or work as an organization in its entirety to stack the deck as favorably as possible against a competitive insurgent. But it also sure doesn’t mean that they are going to roll out the red carpet for a candidate like Sanders, do everything to his liking, make it as easy as possible for him to compete, and not throw up some obstacles or play some defense.

Fairness doesn’t mean you start off with an equal voice at the table to one of a political party’s longtime standard bearers, and it sure doesn’t mean that people at the table aren’t and don’t have a right to rally behind that standard bearer. The crowd of people who choose to not be registered Democrats covetously standing around the table sure doesn’t automatically get to control the table, its menu, dishware selection, doilies, tablecloth color, and music selection, no matter how loud and proud they are. Yes, like any new member of a sports team or business or organization, there are dues to be paid, and the people who are already there and there for some time have certain natural advantages that come from their relationships with the parts of that organization and the people working in it. The blood, sweat, and tears borne of these ties, earned over time, are themselves example of the dues these people paid over the time they have put in and sacrificed. 

To suggest that a new person should immediately be given such benefits without actually earning them, or that the people who have such benefits should forfeit them even though they have earned them by building relationship over time through sacrifice and teamwork, is, frankly, absurd in the extreme. In fact, one would be hard pressed to find any institution anywhere that allows for such a system where the neophyte is given the same respect, access, and support as the veteran. What is fair to expect is that the rules governing their behavior be the same in the event of competition; but the athlete who puts in more time, training, and works better with his teammates has every right to such advantages, having earned them, just as much as the new athlete has every right to expect that the rules on the field (if not the locker room) will be the same for all.

The Case of (& for) Superdelegates

The question is all about degree, and the superdelegates are a case in point: should Party leaders—those who are most loyal, work the hardest, have put in the most time, and have been in the trenches for years—have an actual say in the Party’s nomination process? Well, of course, why shouldn’t they!? And why shouldn’t they collectively have a meaningful say, separate from their votes as private citizens and being able to endorse candidates and weigh in on the race throughout? This is not giving them any more power voting-wise in a general national election than any other citizen, for we are talking about their own Party’s nomination process, not the general election. 

Think of corporate boards: the board votes on major decisions, not the employees. Well, the Democratic Party basically gives employees the main say, but has a small board that also weighs in. I actually like the idea of superdelegates, because it shows the Party actually is and means something, that it carries a certain weight; in this way, then, the Party is more, far more, than simply the sum of its voting members’ collective will and whatever its voters decide at any given time. Superdelegates allow the Party to have a rightful say as an organization in their organization’s nomination process. The people’s voice still reigns supreme in the outcome, as delegates bound by voters’ votes (“pledged” delegates) represent over 85% of all the delegates, with superdelegates accounting for less than 15%. And throughout the entirety of sueprdelegate history, a majority of superdelegates has never, ever voted for anyone other than the candidate who had secured the most pledged delegates. 

For the next presidential election, Clinton and Sanders supporters on the Party’s rules committee have agreed to, and are moving on, a proposal that would bind about two-thirds of the superdelegates to the results of the state voting contests but would still allow Senators, House Representatives, Governors, and other prominent Party leaders to vote as they please, preserving the identity of the Democratic Party as something more than just the temporary will of voters at a given point in time.  

One thing is for damn sure: Republican Party officials sure wish they had had superdelegates who could have stopped Trump, and if the Democratic Party nomination process had resulted in someone like Trump, I sure hope the superdelegates would have gone against such a candidate, as intended. 

Another scenario is worth consideration: what if Sanders had gotten essentially a tie with Clinton or even earned slightly more votes and pledged delegates than she did, but, as is currently the case, she still won the vast majority of registered Democrats and Bernie Sanders won on the backs of non-Democratic independents; in such a situation, there is a good case to be made that the superdelegates should favor her and push her over the edge to victory since 1.) they would be acting to shore up the will of the actual members of the Democratic Party 2.) independents are far less reliable voters than Democrats and their turnout is consistently lower, too 3.) the Party owes actual Democrats far more than independents, whose support is fickle 4.) both Sanders’ approach to politics and his actual policy proposals are objectively delusional given political realities 5.) Sanders would certainly do worse than Clinton in a general election given that his views and methods are so far out of the mainstream and so far to the left of most Americans in a country where 47 out of 50 states contain more self-identified conservatives than liberals and since the polls that earlier showed him as performing better than Clinton in a general election are demonstrably historically inaccurate. Of course the Party would be smart to (and would likely) move their positions a bit closer to those of Sanders and his independent backers in an effort to win them over, but to back Sanders for the nomination, for all these reasons, would have been a bad move, even a suicidal one. However, if a majority of registered Democrats had picked Sanders, the case would be much harder to make that the superdelegates should support Clinton and they likely would not have enough votes to give her the nomination, all things being equal.

The Case for Closed Primaries

Yes, Americans have constitutionally guaranteed rights to vote for their representatives and their president, but no Constitutional or inherent right to weigh in on who the political parties will provide as their candidates for president; that’s for the parties to decide.

Basically, independents are lucky when they get to participate in a party’s nomination process, but it is their decision to not affiliate with a party that prevents them from voting during a party’s nomination process if they live where there is a closed primary. If a person chooses not to affiliate with a party, that’s a good indication that that person does not share the values of that party nearly as much as the people who do choose to affiliate with it. And political parties are all about citizens with shared values organizing to gain political power for like-minded purposes. So what gives an independent and inherent right to participate in any party’s nomination process? Nothing, nothing at all, except it a state party organization feels generous and, instead of a closed primary, it holds an open one.

Sometimes this can lead to mischief: according to various exit polls, in West Virginia’s open primary, anywhere from a huge minority of Bernie Sanders voters to a significant majority of them indicated they would be voting for Trump in November; as Trump had already basically won the Republican nomination contest, it is possible some of Trump’s supporters wanted to hurt Clinton, who had also virtually won the nomination but was in a much tighter race with Sanders, by voting for Sanders. With restrictions on primary participation, such mischief is more than possible…

In addition to this mischief, open primaries prevent parties from having any control over who weighs in on their nomination process in those contests, leaving them open to possible takeovers, and kill the major incentive for people to register and become real members of a party, supporting it over time. It essentially weakens the middleman roll that parties and elites play between voters and individual candidates, leaving them more susceptible to demagogues and increasing the likelihood of voting based on personality rather than on a set of shared values and principles.

Conclusion: Fair Does Not Mean Surrender to the New Guy & We Still Need Political Parties to Be an Actual Thing

The point is, the Party and its officials have every right to support the candidate they think best represents the party’s ideas and values, who has supported the Party through thick and thin, and has the best chance of winning and the best ability to govern. As the conservative RedState pointed out, with this e-mail “scandal,” people were complaining about the Democratic Party doing what the Republican Party already does openly and to a far more intense degree. In fact, virtually any political party anywhere will favor its own longtime loyalists over outside critics; if there was an American “Democratic Socialist Party” that was the only major U.S. political party besides the Republican Party, and Hillary Clinton was a “democrat” trying to push the Democratic Socialist Party hard towards the center, you can sure bet that the people at the Democratic Socialist National Committee (DSNC) would be discussing ways to marginalize her and protect their favored candidate. This is just basic, elemental politics and basic, elemental human and organizational behavior.

In the end, allowing a fair vote (sometimes only among registered Democrats and sometimes allowing independents, per those local decisions), laying out and enforcing the same rules for all candidates, and not directly giving one candidate material resources that another is not offered is about all that can, and should, be expected. Asking people working within the Party to not privately express or have preferences, to avoid discussing strategy to benefit one candidate or another as part of private internal discussions that mention actions that will be given no official sanction or approval by the party apparatus, or to not put up any even informal resistance to a hostile takeover is an absurdly delusional expectation that goes against human nature and the modus operandi of any organization.

Well, going back to the DNC e-mails, Bernie was allowed to compete in the Democratic Party primary even though his actual standing in said party for this election was questionable; both he and Clinton had to compete under the same rules, and while the Party “favored” her in so much as the vast majority of registered Democrats supported her and obviously the vast majority of officials in the Democratic party supported her, there is zero evidence that any of the voting was conducted in a way designed to benefit Clinton over Sanders and suppress Sanders voters, or that any material benefit was given to the Clinton campaign that was not offered to the Sanders campaign. Clinton won because more people voted for her (especially more Democrats), giving her far more pledged than Sanders. Not the DNC, not anybody or anything, “stole” the election from or “rigged” the election against Sanders.

Many Sanders supporters are furious that these e-mails showed that DNC staffers did not like Bernie Sanders. But he didn’t like them or the Democratic Party well before he decided to run for president. Without any other evidence of anything substantive actually coming from these e-mails, there is no “scandal,” just passionate supporters—mostly people who aren’t even Democrats—of a losing, outsider candidate furious that they were not able to succeed in a hostile takeover of a party they generally both already did not like and with which they chose not to affiliate…

Nothing terribly newsworthy here, let along surprising or improper.

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 (you can follow him there at @bfry1981), and here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content, or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse January 18, 2016   

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) January 18th, 2016

Evan Vucci – Pool/Getty Images

AMMAN — President Barack  Obama began his final State of the Union speech by speaking undeniable facts about the strength of the economy, later followed by undeniable facts about the security threats from terrorism: how bad they were, and how bad they were not, with a caution against fear and bigotry, in addition to discussing other issues.  These are facts that most Republican candidates want to ignore or deny.  In fact, Obama sounded like a reasonable man asking for reasonable things.  Not, generally, pie in the sky idealism, not calls for the improbable but just the doable.  He busted myth after myth, from the economy to climate change to immigration to foreign policy.  He mentioned smart, sensible, non-extremist goals and strategies on domestic and foreign policy. The rational man calling for rational things was a sad picture, though, too: he was addressing a Congressional body that has been anything but rational since the advent of the Tea Party.  Thus, there is a tragic quality to the scene of such a rational man addressing a multitude consisting of mainly the irrational.

There were many bittersweet things about watching Obama’s final State of the Union speech.  Actually, that’s an understatement because there were many bittersweet feelings as I was watching this man, my president, for whom I had voted twice, give his final address to Congress as outlined in Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution.  This meant that my reactions went from being proud and pleased to being disappointed and frustrated.  But even for his faults, very humanely put on display last night, I could not help but like, admire, and respect this great man as I saw and heard him speak.

No matter how frustrated I am with President Obama, his greatest traits always shine through.  Let’s go through them in detail, as displayed in this final State of the Union speech:

THE GOOD

Charles Dharapak/AP

1.) The sheer force of his vast intellect and his willingness to use it

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Even if you absolutely hate Obama and are a rabid Trump supporter, it is impossible to deny that this man has a brilliant mind.  You might disagree with how he uses it, you might think his understanding of the world is naïve and childish and flat-out-wrong, but the man is unabashedly a thinker and is clearly a man who thinks through things deeply, who is very articulate and well read, and who clearly was not out of place intellectually at Harvard Law School, where he stood out among one of the highest concentrations of brilliant and ambitious minds in the world. 

This is a man who got to see much of the world at an early age and became wiser for his experiences abroad, who clearly displays both a boundless intellectual curiosity and strong tendency to spend time deliberating over problems rather than carelessly rolling dice and jumping into situations impulsively with the feeling of some sort of grand divine wind at his back, markedly unlike his predecessor.  After overdosing on a wanna-be “cowboy” (whatever that means) who thinks that John Wayne is an acceptable source for political philosophy, I was perhaps always and foremost grateful for this aspect of President Obama after eight years of George W. Bush.  I knew that Obama was a man who would spend time thinking over issues and was smart and worldly enough to make his own decisions based on his own understanding, not just rely on personal relationships and trust to make decisions based mainly on who were better advocates of their own agendas because of a Bush-esque lack of a command of the issues.  Like Lincoln, Obama had many smart people around him, his own team of rivals, and more often than not he played them and their disagreements against each other to get the best advice and then make his own decision with their input.  Bush, on the other hand, was a victim of his own team’s rivalries, and lacked the knowledge and judgment to realize when his closest, most trusted people were flat out wrong until it was far too late. 

If anything, Obama moved the pendulum too far into the deliberative mode at the expense of action some of the time, but, frankly, this is exactly what the American voters as a whole decided they wanted after George W. Bush: they would rather have their leader overthink than underthink, rather not act after the “decisive” impulsive blunders of Bush lead to national disasters unprecedented in modern history than act too rashly.  We’d had enough of “the decider” and his “decision points;” in many ways, the image of our president being Rodin’s The Thinker was a comforting one, and an image we badly needed to send to the world at the time.  His general policy—“Don’t do stupid shit”—may not be perfect but it was just what we wanted (and in many ways needed) after what many consider to be a “lost” decade of recklessness and missed opportunities.  To be fair to Obama, while I would argue that there are some big moments when he should have acted more and thought less, I am willing to admit that I respect the fact that he respected the fact that out power is not limitless and that our capacity for error and for the possibility of unintended consequences were rational reasons not to do more. 

His thoughtful, deliberative State of the Union certainly reminded us that we had a thoughtful, deliberative president.

2.) A superb understanding of the problems of America and the world

AP Photo/Jacky Naegelen, pool

I’ve studied politics, international relations, foreign affairs, conflict, and policy for over fifteen years now.  Most Americans have not.  That places a gulf between most of them and me, the same way an electrical engineer, surgeon, or mandarin speaker who each studied their crafts for over fifteen years would put a vast gulf between themselves and me on those subjects.  It therefore gives me great comfort to see, in Obama, someone who thinks like me: he looks at a problem, studies it, and then uses that info to figure out what needs to be done.  There is not a tremendous amount of ideology in this approach, save aversions to cynicism, selling people out, and acting on emotion.  He knows how to look at the world and he understands it in the general sense of the way I do.  He understands that complex problems do not usually have simple solutions and that reducing things to “good” and “evil” is not usually a productive way to problem solve.  He is also culturally sensitive and has a knack for speaking to people on their terms, not his or ours (that, my friends, is how you reach people).  With Obama, I never had to worry about some sort of irrational, emotional, born-again, religious-driven approach to public policy and political problems.  Regardless of how effective he was as a leader, knowing that Obama could see problems, America, and the world clearly and appreciate that strategy and tactics, speech and deeds, are different things, gave me great comfort.

That in his speech he put a proper perspective on things like terrorism and immigration, where so much misinformation, emotion, and irrationality are omnipresent, was fitting and characteristic of Obama indeed.

3.) Cool, calm, and collected

Buzzfeed video

Another thing I love about Obama is that that man has self-control and knows that getting worked up, and working people up, is often part of the problem in Washington.  He can be relaxed and actually crack some good jokes while being cool and professional.  I appreciated that he made decisions based on a cold analysis, not raw emotions.  The man generally keeps his composure in a way far too many politicians now, especially Tea Partiers, routinely fail to do.  Sure, sometimes people wanted him to be more emotional, but are we that childish that we need our leader to explicitly and loudly express whatever emotions we are feeling at the moment?  Sometimes, I think Republicans think being president is like being a high school football coach (no wonder the areas where high school football is so popular tend to vote Republican).  Obama knows that a cool delivery is all the more effective: Republicans freaked out when Obama didn’t start screaming and bombing in response to Putin’s moves in Ukraine, but Obama fairly quietly implemented sanctions that have helped to cripple Russia’s economy; that’s some Darth Vader stuff, with Obama practically Force-choking Putin economically.  That’s pretty badass in a leader. 

Obama always carried himself with grace and dignity, not with goofiness and shooting-from-the-hip eye-roll-inducing gaffes.  After Bush, Obama felt a bit like James Bond, and that was refreshing.  Yes, sometimes he would tear up when talking about murdered children, sometime he would channel the great African-American rhetorical tradition to communicate in a different style than his normal approach, but Obama was usually one cool customer in an era where the rhetoric has increasingly become hyperbolic and extreme.  Often, those making the most noise and spewing the most venom were quick to blame Obama for the partisanship, but just listening to Obama and taking in his delivery, it was clear they had no one to blame but themselves for the tone and partisanship of the era. 

Throughout most of the last seven years, at the very least the President of the United States did his best to personally set an example of a tone that was respectful and measured, grounded and cordial relative to what was devolving around him.  That he kept his cool so well in these trying times was a credit to him and his presidency, showing that it was possible to operate a measured, mature approach.  And often (see the Benghazi hearing with Clinton) but not always, he laid down an example that his party followed much more often that the Republicans did.

4.) Obama’s likability

Admit it: Obama is just likable.  He’s obviously super smart but also has a common touch, able to talk sports or music and crack a good joke while he is out and about. He smiles a lot (and what a killer smile) and can speak and appeal to people of all kinds of diverse backgrounds.  The man can also sing, whether it’s Al Green or “Amazing Grace.”  He is relaxed, and easy to talk to, and thrives in town-hall style meetings. In fact, the second town-hall-style debate against Romney was the moment for many when Obama successfully fended off Romney’s candidacy.  It’s not bad to have a cool president that people at home and around the world actually like and can identify with when he travels around the world.  Heck, even some Republicans admit that Obama is a likable guy.  This quality of his was very much on display as he delivered his final State of the Union speech, which he even opened with a joke about the 2016 presidential race.

5.) Obama’s idealism

Shepard Fairey

Soon, I will be brutally honest about Obama’s idealism’s limitations and its downside, but, to be fair, I must also acknowledge its positives.  Many Americans find themselves cynical and jaded (myself among them); some are so desperate to find change that they flock to dangerously naïve, inexperienced, and unprepared candidates, or to those who have virtually no shot at winning a general election.  To have our head of state not give into this cynicism and to be constantly promoting a lofty idealism, and at least show the American public and the world that even if we have given up on each other and ourselves that our leader has not, is not insignificant.  Even if they seem distant, the visions of America, its people, and its politics that Obama keeps dangling in front of us that at least remind us what is, theoretically at least, possible, even if not this year or even soon.  And it is important for us to hear these things.  Obama keeps confidently projecting that our best days are ahead of us, and, in spite of all the problems we face, he may be right.  One thing Obama that deserves credit for understanding is that if Americans don’t believe we have better days ahead, that makes it that much more difficult bring about a more positive reality.  Even if Obama has failed to convince many of this, you sure can’t blame him for trying. 

Obama also knows how essential it is that the Democrats and Republicans work together to pass legislation to solve America’s problems, even if Republicans in Congress are not very interested in working with him or Democrats at all.  That Obama tried, and tried hard, to reach out to Republicans—for example: helping to incorporate many conservative, Republican-originated ideas into the Affordable Car Act (ACA)—is something else which for which he is to be commended to a degree, at least in principle.  Even in his final State of the Union, Obama pleaded not only with politicians but with the American people to work together for the common good with passion and eloquence, laying a vision of the future that should be a common aspiration for all Americans.

Having just gone over what I will miss most about Obama, using his speech to illustrate these points, now, I will go over what I find most frustrating about him, using the same speech.

THE BAD

AP

1.) Obama’s idealism

Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

Yes, we have some overlaps here: one of Obama’s greatest strengths is perhaps also his greatest weakness.  Obama came into office ready to hold hands with Republicans, take their ideas into account and include them in his programs, ready to sit down at the table with them and discuss, discuss, and discuss… He expected reasoned and prevailed argument to prevail.  His expectations were lofty indeed, and reality never came close to them.  As I noted, to a degree this is admirable.  But pretty early on—in fact, even before he assumed office—it was clear that a dark undercurrent of America’s polity, harnessing racism, ignorance, fear, demagoguery, regionalism, and obstructionism at some of its worst manifestations since the Civil Rights Era—was coming to take corporeal form; it was clear when only three Republican senators and zero Republican representatives voted for the stimulus package, but the form of this dark undercurrent was most visibly demonstrated in the gestation of the Tea Party in the season of the great “debate” over health care reform.  In many places in the country, mobs shouted down congressman attempting to defend or discuss the Administration’s attempts at healthcare reform during town hall meetings with their constituents.  The Democrats’ plan advocated by Obama incorporated several significant conservative and Republican-originated ideas, and gave up on some long-held liberal dreams like a public-option or a single-payer system, but this made no difference to congressional Republicans in the end and got him not one single Republican vote for the Affordable Care Act.  Basically, Obama began negotiations with major compromises, intended as an olive branch to win over Republican goodwill, but seeking that goodwill proved to be a fool’s errand as, in the end, the Republicans were only interested in obstruction or sabotage.  This meant that Obama began from a weakened bargaining position, having already offered compromises publicly to a hardened and intransigent Republican Party that had no interest cooperating with Obama whatsoever. 

Yes, it made sense for him to try to work with Republicans, but not long after it was clear they would not work with him, he should have gone into combat mode.  Instead, he kept trying to earn their support long after it was clear it was not coming.  What was most unforgivable is that Obama continued this style of “leadership” well after the lessons of the stimulus and ACA, for years, even into his second term, and this resulted in Obama being repeatedly outplayed on budget deals, to the frustration of his own party; through this approach, Obama also unwittingly helped to legitimize threatening both government shutdowns and not voting to raise the debt ceiling as legitimate hostage-taking-style tactics for Republican extremists because he rewarded such threats, while his own efforts at bipartisanship have gone largely unrewarded.  It was hard for me not to laugh out loud when Obama suggested in his speech that even now Republicans and Democrats could work together to pass meaningful legislation…

In his speech he also seemed to think that somehow the American people will improve the tone and tenor of our politics, which seem terribly naïve, given that we ourselves are becoming increasingly more partisan and that we are the ones who have been electing increasingly partisan people to office who are reflecting the pressures that we are placing upon them.

Sadly, the same idealism that made him such an attractive candidate and helped propel him into the White House was one of his largest constraints while he was in office.  Even as he appealed to our idealism in his final State of the Union, for many, including his supporters, the limits of his idealism and the problems it caused were only too painfully obvious.

2.) Obama’s disdain of politics, or, Obama the professor vs. Obama the president

Obama campaign

There are times when I wonder if Obama knows the difference between lectures and leadership, being a professor and being a president.  This State of the Union speech, sadly, was one of those times.

I will admit, I kind of felt stupid when I was watching the speech.  When Obama started talking about how much our system needed to change, when he mentioned redistricting (which I have identified as one of the major problems facing our democratic republic), I thought for the briefest of seconds that he was going to say advocate constitutional amendments to address redistricting and money in politics (Hillary Clinton has been advocating a constitutional amendment to help address campaign finance for some time).  Barring some sort of major disaster/attack, this is the last time Obama will command the attention of this large a number of Americans, so I thought he might, I don’t know, be bold.  That he would call for a constitutional amendment, that he would announce a plan to mobilize activists to lobby state legislatures and congressmen and that he would tour the country to drum up support and force the issue just in time for the election.  But that’s kind of a lie; I knew deep down that this is what I wanted, that this is what I wished, but that this was not on Obama’s nature or character.  This was classic Obama, giving a lecture to university students: “Ok class, today I’m going to lay out what the problems are, and discuss what needs to be done to solve those problems.”  And, much like a professor, Obama does both these things excellently.  But then the lecture is up, like all situations with all professors and all classes, nothing happens after class.  Like a professor, he steps away from the podium as if it is not his role to take a commanding lead and tell us step-by-step what his plan is and how he will take us all forward, how he will overcome obstacles, how he will get things done.  Like a professor, he look at the presidency in a pure, academic form, where the Constitution does not call for the president to campaign for his party and its agenda.  Thus ends theory, but in practice the party of the president very much relies the president to be its campaigner in chief.  But Obama, with his clear disdain of politics, shunned this role, tried to remain aloof and apart from the party politics.  In fact, he did this to such a degree that members of his own party angrily complainedthat he was not helping them enough in their reelection campaigns, a traditional if informal part of the modern presidency.  In general, Obama stayed out of the trenches and preferred to delegate lobbying Congress to his vice president, Joe Biden.

Even on his greatest domestic policy accomplishment—The Affordable Care Act—this is more than amply demonstrated.  Obama the professor campaigned on the broad outcomes we needed in healthcare reform.  Obama the professor then let Congress and the American people debate for months about what a plan would and would not look like, let congressional democrats take the lead in crafting a plan.  Obama the professor even held an academic-conference-like summit with Congressional Republicans and Democrats (it accomplished nothing: note the lack of similar summits after this one).  At no point did he simply say “Here is the plan my team and I have come up with” and pressured his own party like hell to pass it when Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate.  Obama the professor preferred to stay aloof and above the politics as much as possible, Obama the professor viewed a clear line between Congress and the Presidency when it came to legislation, preferring to let Congress, not his team, write the bill.  Obama never made any public attempt to advocate for single-payer or a public option, and the Affordable Care Act was significantly weaker and less impressive than it could have been, starting from a position already offering compromise and hanging in the air for months while the President stayed on the sidelines and during which public opinion, exposed to unified Republican distortions and misinformation without President Obama leading Democrats with a vigorous counternarrative, soured on the bill.  The end result reflects all these tactical and strategic mistakes by the Obama Administration, and even for all its accomplishments, the ACA fell far short of what it could have been. Thus, in the end, ACA/Obamacare was far less than the outcomes Obama had campaigned for, but having delegated the task of crafting the solution to lesser men, the result is hardly surprising. 

This was how Obama acted when it came to his signature piece of domestic legislation, so I must have been crazy if I thought Obama was going to help lead and guide an attempt at a constitutional amendment overturning the infamous Citizens United Supreme Court decision.

Even now, I want to scream at Obama, “You have time!  Pick one big thing and just throw yourself into it, be relentless, tour the country, lobby individual Congressman, president like your time presidenting is almost over, because it is almost over!”  But it would be useless.  And this is probably the most vexing thing for me when it comes to Obama, something I will never understand.  What happened to the “fierce urgency of now???”  It sure could have been fiercer.  And with a gifted politician like Obama in the vanguard… well, the tantalizing thoughts of lost possibilities, especially in the crucial first few years, especially when there was a chance to dent the impact of the Tea Party, are heartbreaking to consider…

This last Obama State of the Union speech was Obama at his best, but also his worst.  It was Obama being Obama.

*****

THE LEGACY

How, then, in the end, will Obama be remembered?  Perhaps, not altogether fairly, he will be remembered primarily as America’s first non-white and first black president (even though he is half white!).  This is an extremely symbolic thing and yet the making it happen was quite a thing of substance.  Yet this has nothing to do with the man’s accomplishments once in office: digging America out of the colossal economic ditch it was thrown into by the Bush Administration, first with the continuation and implementation of TARP and then Obama’s implementation of the stimulus, putting America on a slow but steady path to recovery; making America the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the world and greatly reducing America’s dependence on foreign energy while also dramatically increasing America’s use of renewable energy; singing into law the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), the greatest piece of domestic legislation and step forward for the American healthcare system since the Civil and Voting Rights Acts and the creation of Medicare and Medicaid under Lyndon Jonson in the 1960s; appointing two competent, fine women judges to the Supreme Court; bringing Osama bin Laden to justice; ending the U.S. occupation of Iraq responsibly; and achieving major diplomatic breakthroughs with both Iran and Cuba, achieving a nuclear agreement with the latter that should prevent a war between Iran and the West for many years to come and perhaps far beyond that.

The White House

Yes, Obama could have achieved so much more, could have fought harder and led more boldly, and it is a tragedy that he was unable to use the office of president more effectively.  But it was the better angel of his nature—his desire to bring Republicans and Democrats together, to work in a bipartisan manner, to transcend party politics—that often led to his greatest frustrations, that led to his domestic power and accomplishments being very little for the last five years of his presidency after his initial two had accomplished so much.  But his failures came from a place a good intentions in a way that is somewhat admirable, and, in the end, the balance sheet of history will show that his failures will not drown out his accomplishments and that he will be viewed positively by historians, at the very least a pretty good president presiding over extraordinarily difficult times, even if he will never be regarded as great.  Especially coming after the disastrous presidency of George W. Bush, Americans of all stripes should be grateful for his presidency; of course, the reality is that many of them will never realize this, let alone admit it, but history will vindicate him, if not the quality of American politics that took hold during his tenure, though that deterioration occurred in spite of his best efforts, not because of them.

SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

I’ll miss him, even as I hope the next president is better.

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