Will digital trail nail Trump supporters?

By Kenneth Tiven

If you send texts, images, email, search the Internet, click “like” on items on social networking apps, and record voice messages, you leave electronic fingerprints you think are harmless but can be used against you. 

American politicians and Russian military leadership are learning these lessons in different battlegrounds. Several thousand text messages were exchanged with the White House before and during the insurrection on January 6, 2021, at the US Capitol. Senior officials ignored warnings it was illegal to disrupt formal acceptance of Joseph Biden’s election victory. This fact will be critical in any criminal prosecution.

Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows gave these texts to the House select committee in a battle over a subpoena. For example, Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania urged Meadows to have the nation’s top intelligence official investigate baseless conspiracy theories. Perry wanted Trump to replace the US acting attorney general with an acolyte willing to do Trump’s bidding. Before politics, Perry was an Army brigadier general who piloted helicopters in the Iraq war. 

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The Senate Judiciary Committee’s Democratic majority released a report in 2021 outlining Perry’s participation in efforts with others to push the Justice Department to find evidence of fraud, even though it had looked and found none at that point. 

This evidence will make for interesting televised public hearings just before the bi-annual elections. The House committee can investigate and report, but it does not have prosecuting power. Its information goes to the US Department of Justice, which has an ongoing investigation into criminal behavior related to the election.

Will the events of 2021 before the Inauguration make a difference in how people vote? Probably will not change the minds of people who find the current Republican ideology attractive. On the other hand, this may help generate a better turnout of Democratic Party voters worried that democracy is on the bubble.

Before election results were available, efforts to prevent certification had started. Organizing for the Capitol attack began after the election, with two related aspects— getting Republicans and Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to accept some results from some states. Secondly, to organize a large demonstration at the Capitol. Did the backers of this plan expect the hardcore violent right-wingers to trash the building? That is to be determined.  

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Trump’s Big Lie about election fraud never stops. In early April, he said he didn’t win because the election was “rigged.” He will not utter the word “lost.”

Dozens of Republican politicians and Fox News people texted with Trump’s chief of staff throughout the insurrection day. Meadows is fighting in court to keep a December week of texts out of the committee’s hands. This demonstrates that Meadows was at the center of a giant conspiracy baselessly claiming a stolen election cost Trump his job. He has a personal legal problem as well, having registered to vote at three different addresses simultaneously.

Losing credibility seems to be a consistent problem for the insurrectionists and the Russian military. A combination of fear and frustration with Russia’s attack on Ukraine has dominated US news. Vladimir Putin’s confidence about this war might have developed from his interaction with former President Trump in 2018. Trump was critical of the NATO military alliance and made his feelings clear in a Helsinki meeting. Assuming Putin believed Trump’s assessment of NATO’s behavior and capabilities demonstrates that both men misjudged everything. 

Visual images created by Russia’s wanton attack on civilians are a policy and not an accident. Geo-data attached to images of atrocities pinpoint locations and times–those electronic fingerprints–when the Russian soldiers committed them. Bodies left scattered in the streets to emphasize their brutality is a tactic. Perhaps Russian citizens dependent on state-controlled media have not seen them. They are probably quietly circulating there, as well as images of the battleship sinking after a Ukrainian missile strike. 

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Republican leadership in America does not control all the media, but it does have a powerful ally in Fox News. That channel and its related digital services are “partners” in a unified campaign on social issues that matter to its voters:  

• opposition to pandemic medical experts, 
• blaming inflation on President Biden,
• attacking school textbooks that mention sexual issues.

Party leaders believe these emotional issues will win control of both houses of Congress in November. This reporter remembers political science Professor Mickey McCleary explaining that people vote on emotions, not economic interests. This behavior has been an operative aspect of American politics for more than 225 years. Republicans want to control Congress to stymie Biden’s agenda, theoretically making a GOP victory more manageable in 2024. 

Trump says he might run in 2024. However, this assumes he does not have a legal or medical problem. Several states are trying to use revised voting districts and rules to reduce the impact of people inclined to vote for Democrats. A massive voter turnout—not likely in non-presidential years—is needed in October & November to keep Democratic majorities in Congress. 

People have died in some of the preliminary skirmishes in the conflict over constitutional democracy in the United States. The effort to restrict voting and individual rights depends on state legislatures’ regulations and laws. The rapidity of the Republican efforts to change the playing field is evident, especially in a state whose Governor has his eye on the White House. 

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is the poster child for an increasingly fascist Republican Party working hard to skew state electoral systems to achieve a single party lock on government at all levels. Like Orbán’s government in Hungary and Putin’s in Russia, he envisions a government that exists to support a small group of wealthy backers and their devout followers.  

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DeSantis picked a fight with the Disney company over its opposition to his position on gender rights. Last week Florida legislators rushed to repeal the special district that governs Disney World. However, they overlooked an obscure provision in Florida law that says the state could not do what legislators were doing — unless the state paid off the bond debt.

About 1 billion dollars remain on the bond debt. That’s a hefty price for Florida residents if they have to pay to make DeSantis happy. The ending, whatever it is, has lawyers involved.  

It does prove there are impediments for behaving like a dictator. 

America’s fundamental rights

It took two centuries for the promises in the USA’s Declaration of Independence to reflect in American life. For a very long time, the idea that all people are “endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness rang hollow. There was slavery. Also, the founders and their progeny preserved the racial, gender, and wealth inequality that marked class and color differences. 

In the aftermath of World War II colonialism gave way to democracies like India, and America shifted. Supreme Court Rulings interpreted post-civil war laws from the 19th century to mean that no state can “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” This began to change longstanding racial, gender, class, and religious hierarchies. 

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By the mid-1960s, a Democratic-controlled Congress passed voting rights legislation to end discriminatory practices, which worked. So the Republican Party adopted an oppositional outlook on these issues and attracted many people who preferred the old way. American conservatives are supposedly deeply committed to the ideals of personal liberty, limited government, free markets, human dignity, and the like. Still, they want it delivered by an authoritarian government that doesn’t treat “others” the same way. This path diminishes the advantages of American democracy. 

The ideology and current behavior of the right-wing political movement in the United States is a retreaded version of what has animated American politics since the American revolution sent the British back to England In 1776. It was most notable, leading to the Civil War in the mid-19th century. 

Post-World War Two was a period of exhaustion and enlightenment for European nations; losers and winners had to give up their colonial holdings. India, long opposed to British domination, was among the first to benefit, having its long-sought ambitions answered with the Independence Act of 1947.

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Today many American state governors and legislatures behave in ways that make clear their unhappiness with a robust national government setting social and economic policies at variance with their desires. The role played by the four chaotic years of Donald Trump as president encouraged this attitude. What we have experienced, amplified by the simplistic and selfish nature of Donald Trump, is an approach to economic and social issues wrapped in a blanket of religious fundamentalism. This is the anti-Communism rhetoric of the John Birch Society in the 1950s, updated for today’s world.