This installment is greatly focused on the historic figure of the 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump. Any who may not read on because they simply don’t want to hear about him anymore, I understand. But to any who object because they resent partisanship in political discourse and historical analysis, I would argue, at this point, that criticism of Donald Trump’s actions in office and out of it is no longer partisan. If you care about American democracy, you should listen on.

It was recently reported that President Joe Biden took some time in early August to sit down for a 2-hour conference with a group of history scholars who spoke to him with some urgency regarding the historical moment in which the United States now finds itself. Specifically, this varied group of historians included Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Jon Meacham, Presidential Historian Michael Beschloss, expert on Human Rights Allida Black, Pulitzer -winning journalist Anne Applebaum, and Sean Wilentz, whom you may remember for his unfortunate criticism of the 1619 Project, which I spoke about in my defense of the project. These experts raised concerns not only about the rise of authoritarianism and threats to democracy around the world, but specifically to the danger that American democracy currently faces. These historians are not alone. According to a very recent NBC News poll, “threats to democracy” have replaced concerns about the economy as the most important issue to voters. Many are those who think they’re clever but only reveal their ignorance by pointing out that “We’re a republic, not a democracy,” but of course, a republic, by definition, is a democracy. Specifically, it is a form of government in which power resides in the voting populace, with their will exercised by their elected representatives. Or as Founding Father Alexander Hamilton once wrote of the Constitution, “This representative democracy as far as is consistent with its genius has all the features of good government.” The fragility of American democracy is not a new concern. Even back when our democratic system of government was still in the intermediary stage between the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, we more than once almost went a different way with our experiment. In 1782, there was there a conspiracy among the leaders of the Continental Army, who had not been paid, and who threatened what would essentially have been a coup d'état, proposing to establish a constitutional monarchy with General Washington as its king. Had it not been for Washington’s famous rejection of the offer and subsequent efforts to quell the so-called Newburgh Conspiracy by arranging payment for the troops, our country might have taken a decidedly different path. Then in 1787, during the convening of the Constitutional Convention, rumors swirled about the Continental Congress scheming to offer a proposed regency over the United States to Hohenzollern Prince Henry of Prussia. Indeed, the anxieties and the protest ran so high that the conclave at the Philadelphia Convention had to print an official denial that they intended to establish another monarchy. For decades, these rumors and accusations were unsubstantiated, but in the early 20th century, corroborating evidence appears to have been found in the royal Prussian archives in Charlottenburg. A letter from Henry of Prussia, addressed to an old friend, Baron von Steuben, a Prussian-American general who had whipped the Continental Army into shape during the Revolution and was retired in New York at the time of the Philadelphia Convention, remarks pretty directly on the offer. In French, Henry writes, “I confess that I cannot believe that we can resolve to change the principles of the government which has been established in the United States of America, but if the entire nation should agree to establish others, and would choose for its model the constitution of England, according to my judgment I must admit that it is of all constitutions the one that seems the most perfect to me.” Now if either the Newburgh Conspiracy or the Prussian Scheme had succeeded in their designs, we cannot claim that America would be any less a democracy than is the UK, but both stories serve to show that now is certainly not the first time the fate of our particular brand of democracy has been threatened. This is not to say that concerns are unwarranted. Rather, it is to demonstrate that vigilance is required to preserve our way of life.

Let us begin this discussion by bringing the blog full circle back to the topic of my very first installment, which I removed from the podcast feed a while back because the sound mix wasn’t great and the subject matter caused some new listeners who started at the beginning to not give the podcast a chance. However, the transcript is still available here. Its topic was demagoguery. From the establishment of our federal government, the biggest threat to American democracy has always been the danger of a demagogue coming along and manipulating the people for his own benefit. George Washington wrote to Marquis de Lafayette during the Constitutional Convention that he feared “some aspiring demagogue who will not consult the interest of his Country so much as his own ambitious views” might exploit the opportunity to seize power. And during the convention, numerous speeches indicate that this danger was on many minds. James Madison spoke of the “Danger of Demagogues,” Elbridge Gerry asserted that “Demagogues are the great pests of our government, and have occasioned most of our distresses,” and Alexander Hamilton warned over and over against the threat of demagogues. In The Federalist Papers, he warned that they were the historical cause of the overturning of most republics—men who start out as demagogues, “paying an obsequious court to the people,” thereafter becoming tyrants. This danger is one of the principal reasons for the checks and balances baked into the system. Specifically, the power of impeachment was the ultimate check against a demagogue chief executive. So what is a demagogue? We might judge from one revision to the records of the convention, in which Elbridge Gerry states that “The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue; but are the dupes of pretended patriots.” This term, pretended patriots, had originally been taken down as “demagogues” and was later changed. This sentiment seems rather anti-democratic at first blush, as if the people don’t know what’s good for them and need governing, but in fact, his concern is exactly that some authoritarian ruler may fool the American people into raising him up, that the populace might be exploited by one who only pretends to serve them but in fact serves only himself. I’ll revisit the quote from James Fenimore Cooper that I shared in my first episode, “The peculiar office of a demagogue is to advance his own interests, by affecting a deep devotion to the interests of the people…. The demagogue is usually sly, a detractor of others, a professor of humility and disinterestedness, a great stickler for equality as respects all above him, a man who acts in corners and…appeals to passions and prejudices rather than to reason, and is in all respects a man of intrigue and deception, of sly cunning…instead of manifesting the frank, fearless qualities of the democracy he so prodigally professes.” In that first episode, without stating it outright, since back in 2016 it seemed gauche, I implied, rather heavy-handedly, that this described Donald Trump to a T, as it were, and I went on to compare him to Lewis Charles Levin, a 19th century nativist demagogue. Now, today, there are many valid reasons that the public fears U.S. democracy may be in peril, such as polarization, misinformation online, loss of trust in the media, etc. But without leaning too heavily on the I-told-you-so button, I must argue that the principal threat to our democracy in recent years has been and continues to be incorporated in the person of the former president. There are many historical parallels to the danger we now face and the threat he continues to represent, and we will examine them, but it must be conceded that this existential threat to American democracy, embodied and incited as it is by a disgraced former leader of the country, is utterly unique.

*Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States*, by Howard Chandler Christy (1940)

After the failure of the Capitol Insurrection on January 6th 2021, it seemed Trump had finally been revealed as the anti-democratic force that he clearly is. More than a year later, with the revelations of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol and Trump’s central role in inciting the insurrection made more and more clear, it has been truly disheartening to see so many Republican representatives and talking heads on conservative media fall in line to defend the indefensible. And now, since the FBI search warrant executed at Mar-a-Lago and the revelation that Trump illegally took classified documents out of the White House and kept them at his private residence for years, it has been further dispiriting to see Trump’s civilian foot soldiers launch more than one assault on FBI offices. These criminals who have taken up arms against federal law enforcement in what should rightly be considered a second insurrection do so because they think the agency is wrongfully persecuting Trump, and they believe Trump’s explanations that he was just taking work home with him because don’t we all do that? When it was revealed that the “work” Trump removed from the White House included classified and Top Secret documents, these true believers credited Trump’s further explanation that he had actually declassified the documents he took home, under a standing order that anything he took out of the Oval Office be automatically declassified. This last claim was called “preposterous” by national security experts who explain that the classification system has been established over the course of numerous executive orders since World War II, requiring the head of whatever department or agency originally classified the document to review them before declassification and to consult with any other agency or department that may have some interest in the classified material before officially removing the classification marking from the document. Anyone who would believe that the very act of removing the document from the Oval Office declassified it just because Trump said it did, without any official executive order to change the declassification process, simply doesn’t understand the matter and should defer to the experts. The fact of the matter is, Trump appears to have broken numerous laws by taking these documents home with him. Section 1924 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code specifies that a person removing classified information without authority and keeping them “at an unauthorized location” can be fined and imprisoned for five year. Of course, Trump is arguing that, as the chief executive, he had that authority, but the Presidential Records Act of 1978 further clarifies the powers of a sitting President when it comes to document handling. It is pretty fitting that Trump, who is the only U.S. president to have been impeached twice, has now run afoul of a law passed because of Richard Nixon, another flagrantly corrupt President who made history as the only president to have resigned in the face of certain impeachment and removal from office. When Nixon resigned in 1974, he wanted to take all of his presidential documents home with him, including recordings that were important evidence of his crimes. Fearing that evidence would be destroyed, Congress passed the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act, making Nixon’s records public property. And in 1978, having learned our lesson about what a corrupt president might try, the Presidential Records Act was passed so that no future president could remove documents from the White House like Nixon tried to do. Under this law, the American people own those records and documents, and upon a president leaving office, they must be removed directly to the National Archives. Trump’s further explanation that his exit from the White House was simply chaotic, and that the documents were taken by mistake, is perhaps more believable but does not excuse his actions. What it reveals is that he was so certain that he would succeed in overturning the election that he never bothered to pack and ended up having to do what many call an old fashioned shit-shove. However, ignorance is no justification, and since it has come out that someone in his inner circle informed the FBI that these classified materials were in his possession, it seems apparent that even if he didn’t realize what he'd taken at the time, he certainly must have known a year and a half later, especially after a grand jury subpoenaed Trump for the documents in June and he still did not surrender them, necessitating the FBI search of his home.

In fairness, we do know of at least one other American president to have taken home classified documents, and it was a Democrat: Lyndon B. Johnson. Of course, this was years before the passage of the Presidential Records Act and decades before section 1924 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code. In 1969, when Nixon took office and Johnson vacated the White House, he secretly told a staffer to smuggle out some highly classified documents. The contents of the documents and the reason for their removal takes us back further, to the 1968 presidential race, when Richard Nixon, who had previously been Dwight Eisenhower’s vice-president and had been thwarted in his presidential aspirations by the popular John F. Kennedy, Johnson’s late predecessor, ran against Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s VP. This was during the height of the war in Vietnam and the anti-war protest movement. In fact, the American public’s widespread opposition to the war was one of the principal reasons LBJ chose not to run for president again, though he had only served one term as an elected president. As election day drew near in 1968, Johnson saw a path to ending the war in Vietnam in a way that would be acceptable to him, and wanted to pursue it, believing that any indication of his administration ending the war might help Humphrey beat Nixon. However, Richard Nixon became aware of these efforts, and in a stunning betrayal of his country, worked to sabotage peace efforts. Through Anna Chennault, who raised funds for the Republican Party and led the political support group “Republican Women for Nixon,” Nixon made contact with the South Vietnamese government and put pressure on them not to cooperate with Johnson’s peace initiatives. President Johnson, in turn, became aware of Nixon’s sabotage and ordered the FBI to place Chennault under surveillance. From wiretaps, he uncovered evidence of Nixon’s plot “to monkey wrench it,” as one of Nixon’s aides put it. Unsure of what to do with this information, Johnson was on the eve of the election convinced by his cabinet advisers to bury the story. Their reason was that disclosure of the story would be bad for the country, in that it would irreparably harm the American people’s trust in their elected leaders. Certainly this would have been the case. Nixon was elected the next day, but even if disclosure of the story right before Election Day had resulted in a victory for Humphrey, the story would have shown a former vice-president and popular presidential candidate playing politics with the lives of soldiers. In between 1968, when the war in Vietnam might have ended, and 1975, when it did end, countless further lives were lost that might have been saved but for the callous political chess game played by Richard Nixon. And in hindsight, it seems Johnson’s noble motives for keeping Nixon’s treachery a secret were all for nothing. The American public was already disillusioned with the government and its elected leaders. They had been since the start of the Vietnam War and especially since the assassinations of the 1960s that many believed had been orchestrated by our own government. And certainly after Watergate, any vestiges of trust in the American presidency were obliterated regardless. Johnson’s surveillance of Americans in contact with the South Vietnamese embassy in Washington, D.C., was not, at the time, illegal, nor was his removal of classified documents relating to what that surveillance uncovered. In fact, in telling this story, I would argue that rather than comparing what Trump did to what Johnson did, a more apt comparison is to compare Nixon’s betrayal of the country to Trump’s alleged treason.

Richard Nixon gives a speech on the conflict in Vietnam, which he prevented from being resolved in order to win the presidency.

Here we address more clearly what makes Trump a clear and present danger to American democracy. Clearly he was unwilling to give up power and sought to unlawfully overturn the election and steal the presidency. Anyone who denies this now is performing mental gymnastics and ignoring all the evidence presented in the January 6 Committee hearings. But what makes both the insurrection he clearly orchestrated AND his removal of highly classified documents from the White House even more egregious is the evidence that he has improperly colluded with hostile foreign governments. In the wake of the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, when it was revealed that some of the classified documents seized were marked above Top Secret, or S.C.I., which stands for sensitive compartmented information, and that among these were documents containing U.S. nuclear secrets, speculation has run rampant that Trump may have been enriching himself by selling secrets to foreign governments. What evidence is there that Trump has actually done this? The evidence is mostly circumstantial. For example, in the weeks before the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, Trump hosted a controversial Saudi-Arabian funded golf tournament at his golf course in New Jersey, and the timing between this event and the revelation that the FBI recovered classified nuclear documents from Mar-a-Lago resurrected some former allegations raised in 2019 by the House Oversight Committee that the Trump administration attempted to “rush the transfer of highly sensitive U.S. nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia,” even suggesting that his actions may have violated the Atomic Energy Act. Even more recently, since it’s been revealed that a Russian-speaking woman “infiltrated” Mar-a-Lago and Trump’s circle, by posing as a member of the Rothschild banking family, Russia is brought to mind. If we are going to worry about Trump betraying American secrets to a foreign government, we should really be talking more about his collusion with Russia. Throughout his presidency, as the collusion between Trump’s election campaign and Russia was being investigated, Trump maintained that it was a baseless conspiracy theory, but unlike most baseless conspiracy theories, there is overwhelming evidence that his campaign worked with Russia, even if he managed to insulate himself personally. Also unlike baseless conspiracy claims, the evidence for Russian collusion has been vetted and uncovered by credible investigative journalism, not fringe researchers. Again, denying Trump’s involvement with Putin’s Russia takes a purposeful refusal to acknowledge overwhelming documentary evidence. Though Mueller’s report, heavily redacted by Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr, didn’t explicitly implicate Trump himself, his investigation resulted in the conviction of numerous advisers and aides to Trump who had lied about their involvement with Russia, including Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Michael Cohen, George Papadopoulos, Rick Gates, and Steve Bannon. Then there are the uncovered connections between Russia and his administration and close family members, like his Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, his White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci, his first Attorney General Jeff Sessions, his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and his son, Don Jr. As for Trump himself, even discounting the questionable contents of the so-called Steele Dossier, the opposition research that purported to reveal that Trump had been cultivated for years as a Russian asset through blackmail, Trump’s very public praise of Putin in the years leading up to the 2016 campaign, his public call for Russia to hack the Democratic National Committee—which they promptly did—and his actions favorable to Russia while in office all go to support, if not prove, that he may have had, and may still have, an inappropriate relationship with a foreign power that should cause all Americans even greater concern after learning that he attempted to secretly keep classified nuclear documents after being voted out of office.

The warrant executed at Mar-a-Lago did not actually list the Presidential Records Act as a reason for their search. Rather, it cited the section of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that criminalizes the destruction or concealment of documents intended to obstruct an investigation, as well as a section of the U.S. Code dealing with the concealment of public records, and, rather importantly, it cites the Espionage Act. This law was passed in 1917, during World War I, long before Harry Truman penned the first executive order governing the classification of sensitive documents. When searching for a historical parallel for potential prosecution under the Espionage Act of persons accused of mishandling nuclear secrets, one cannot help but consider the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. In the summer of 1950, amid the height of the Second Red Scare, as the Korean War began, a number of Jewish members of the American Communist Party were arrested for conspiracy to commit treason. It began with Ethel Rosenberg’s brother David Greenglass, who worked in the nuclear program as a machinist and was charged with stealing secrets related to our atomic bomb technology. Greenglass pled guilty and named Julius, his brother-in-law, as a co-conspirator. The Truman administration then leaned hard on Julius Rosenberg to get him to name others in their spy ring, but Julius maintained his innocence. The Truman administration claimed Julius was the head of the ring and arrested Julius’s wife Ethel, with whom he had two young sons, despite Greenglass’s insistence that his sister was innocent in the matter. Ethel’s arrest seems to have been only a means of coercing Julius to talk, but he remained uncooperative. So they pursued a death penalty, still, it seems, mostly to scare Julius Rosenberg into giving up others in the ring. However, what Truman seems not to have counted on was the clamorous mob mentality of the American people at the time, who had been led to fear Soviet infiltration and to mistrust all Jews as Communist conspirators. According to polls taken at the time, almost three-quarters of the country wanted to see the Rosenbergs executed. Internationally, however, there were nearly universal calls for clemency. Finding himself in a bind, Truman simply passed the buck to his successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who feared looking weak and, over the protest overseas as well as the counsel of his own advisers, chose to capitulate to the bloodlust of the people, and sent Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to their deaths in 1953. To the end, they maintained their innocence, and for decades, many social critics and scholars likewise argued that the case against them was weak, with evidence predicated on the testimony of an informant trying to save his own skin, evidence as absurd as a Jell-O box being in their possession that was said to be carried as a signal to other spies in the ring, when of course, in the 1950s, one would be hard-pressed to find a household that did not contain a box of Jell-O. These critics were mostly silenced, however, in 1995 with the public disclosure of certain cables intercepted by the Venona project, a U.S. counterintelligence program, which showed that, indeed, Julius Rosenberg had been part of an atomic spy ring.

The fact that the Espionage Act was invoked on the FBI’s warrant to search Mar-a-Lago does not indicate there is any evidence that Trump was selling or disclosing information related to national defense. The Act is used not only to prosecute those who spy for a foreign power but also those who mishandle secrets, including those who leak secrets to the media as whistleblowers. It seems pretty clear, however, that Trump, who openly reviles leakers and all legacy media outlets, was not doing the latter. However, even if he were caught giving American secrets to Russia or the Saudis, let me be clear that I am not advocating for the death penalty. Even in the case of the Rosenbergs, I would argue that justice was not served by taking their lives. Certainly the evidence against Ethel Rosenberg was inconclusive. She was accused over the denials of their informant, and the only evidence against her was a set of notes that she allegedly typed, but it’s impossible to ascertain who actually typed the document. The extent of her crime might have been some vague knowledge of her husband’s activities and tacit approval of them, but this should not have been enough to extinguish her life and leave her children parentless. Even if you do believe that her passive involvement earned her a capital punishment, there is the matter of the unequal apportionment of such sentences. David Greenglass’s wife Ruth was just as likely to have been aware of their activities, but she was never charged. And Greenglass himself, who was more directly guilty of stealing atomic secrets, was sentenced to 15 years and only served nine of them. We might attribute this to his cooperation with investigators, but others involved also were not sentenced to death, such as Klaus Fuchs, a scientist who actually worked directly on the bomb at Los Alamos and only served 9 years. When we consider the Rosenberg case with this context, they appear to have been singled out, perhaps because of Julius’s alleged leadership position in the ring, or perhaps because they had been uncooperative, or perhaps because they were Jews from an immigrant family. Whatever the case, I agree with scholars who argue that in trying not to appear weak, Eisenhower clearly demonstrated his weakness by sacrificing their lives to boost his approval ratings. Ironically, though, while I would not advocate for Trump to face the same sentence as the Rosenbergs, even if it were proven beyond doubt that he did indeed sell or surrender nuclear secrets to a foreign power, he does advocate for death sentences in such cases himself. Speaking about Bowe Bergdahl, Trump on several occasions advocated for shooting traitors.

One should not ask whether or not the former president is capable of treason. He is a human being, and thus fallible. He is capable of it. He has shown throughout his careers, both business and political, that he has no qualms about putting himself before his country. Consider his years of tax avoidance, or his serial disregard of the Emoluments Clause as he used the power of his presidency to enrich himself. If you’re unaware of any of these facts, I might suggest that you choose different news sources. Regardless, though, asking whether he betrayed his country in his handling of Top Secret documents is something of a moot point. The very fact that he incited an insurrection at the Capitol in his efforts to overturn the legitimate results of an election and retain power against the will of the American people is proof enough that he has already betrayed his country and done damage to our democracy. However, as I said, he is just one man. The fact that this man, who openly admires dictators, was elected U.S. president and was thus able to do all this damage is more of an indictment on those who voted him into office, though, than it is to him alone. It is the people who raise up demagogues. And it is the fact that so many Americans voted for Trump and continue to support him despite everything that really has the historians who met with Biden worried. They compared the political climate today to other times in U.S. history when American democracy was at risk, such as before the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln cautioned, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Does this mean we face the threat of another Civil War, as we did in the disputed election of 1876? Or is our situation more like the years before the U.S. joined World War II. I favor this analogy, since just as today we see an entire wing of the support for Donald Trump coming from White Nationalists, the threat to American democracy in the late 1930s was not just from Hitler but also involved a rise in fascist sentiment and anti-Semitism within America, fueled by demagoguery. While fascism was spreading across Europe, Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest with a radio program, spread fascist ideology to his some 30 million listeners. He had started out as a booster of Roosevelt and the New Deal, but his broadcasts turned more and more anti-Semitic, until finally he was praising fascist policies implemented by Hitler and Mussolini. In a kind of deplatforming akin to what happened to InfoWars demagogue Alex Jones, Roosevelt eventually intervened to get Father Coughlin’s program cancelled and make his newspapers illegal to mail. Father Coughlin faded into obscurity after that, unlike Alex Jones. Perhaps it is counter-democratic, but history has shown that the best way to weaken a demagogue is to deny them a platform. Donald Trump, however, is a different beast entirely. Having once held the highest office in the land, voted into office by 63 million citizens and winning the vote of 74 million Americans even when he lost his reelection, he simply cannot be deplatformed. When social media companies tried, validly citing his spread of misinformation and incitement of unlawful acts on January 6th, he simply started his own platform, and his followers, as is their nature, followed.

Father Charles Coughlin giving a speech.

In the years since Trump’s election, numerous books have been published pondering the future of democracy, with titles like, How Democracy Ends, and How Democracies Die. The number of magazine, newspaper, and web articles about democracy being in danger, or in crisis, or decline are countless. And this spring, the Brookings Institution started The Strengthening American Democracy Initiative. Tellingly, the 1930s saw the same rise in alarmed concern for the health of democracy. All over the country, lectures were delivered with titles like “The Future of Democracy,” “The Prospects of Democracy,” “The Crisis of Democracy,” and “How to Save Democracy.” And the similarity did not end at the fact that they faced the spread of authoritarian ideology via demagogues over mass media, just as we do today. Their concern, much like ours in the wake of January 6th, also stemmed from what appeared to have been a failed coup. In 1933, shortly after Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected, numerous right wing paramilitary militias, most of them explicitly white supremacist, formed for the express purpose of inciting rebellion against the progressive president. If this reminds you of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, it should. In this volatile climate, it was not so surprising when, that summer, a Marine Major General named Smedley Darlington Butler informed the FBI that he had been approached by a cabal of Wall Street businessmen and asked to lead a fascist coup, marching on Washington at the head of an army of veterans, to eject not only FDR but also the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, and every other politician in the order of succession. In their place, Butler was tasked with raising up a dictator. Just as Trump-supporters and their complicit media outlets today call the Russian scandal a hoax, so too did much of the press declare that the Business Plot, or the Wall Street Putsch, as it was called, was a hoax, but the congressional committee tasked with its investigation found it to be all too real. And neither were they in the business of just stirring up baseless political controversy. In fact, according to Butler, the committee actually protected the wealthy conspirators by having their names redacted from their final report. It might be tempting to say worries in the 1930s were nothing but hand-wringing, and that the same is true today, that the Wall Street Putsch never would have succeeded in overthrowing democracy, and neither were the Capitol insurrectionists really capable of doing irreparable harm to our democracy. Maybe that’s true. But what about the next time? What about the next demagogue, the next coup?

As I said at the top of this episode, this is not a partisan argument. Any truly patriotic Republican must be just as alarmed as I am by Trump’s actions and his influence on their party. Really they should be even more concerned. But with the recent primary results, in which so many of Trump’s picks took nominations and most of the incumbent Republicans who voted to impeach him lost their support, his stranglehold on the GOP’s electorate appears unyielding. If deplatforming won’t thwart Trump, the most powerful and probably most destructive demagogue in American history, then prosecuting him for his crimes may. And if it is impossible to hold him accountable for his attempt to unlawfully overturn the election, then we must prosecute him under the laws listed on the FBI’s warrant. We need not lock him up, as he was so fond of chanting about Hillary Clinton when she was accused of being careless with classified communications. Rather, a simple fine will suffice as long as he is convicted under the third law on the warrant, Section 2071 of title 18 of the U.S. code, which criminalizes the removal and concealment of records. Conviction under this law makes him ineligible for holding federal office. As for his followers, who pose the real threat, we must welcome their legal protest but likewise aggressively prosecute those who resort to violence and insurrection, which we know they are prone to do. And afterward, we must remain vigilant. We must work to foil the next demagogues, who may have seen what Trump proved was possible and prove themselves more capable than he of carrying it off. And it is not just the next demagogue we must worry about, but also the next coup, which may not be a coup of force but rather a more insidious legal coup. Take, for example, the pending case Moore v. Harper that will be considered by our abjectly partisan Supreme Court. This case will determine the constitutionality of the “independent state legislature” theory, which if recognized as valid by this packed bench, would give state legislatures not only carte blanche to aggressively gerrymander, but would also grant them the ability to throw out presidential election results and appoint electors as they please. Essentially, it would make the overturning of legitimate presidential election results legal. So raise your voice, cast your vote, and pray to whatever power or principle you hold dear that the Department of Justice and elected representatives who genuinely seek to preserve democracy will have the moral fortitude and courage to do what must be done.

Until next time, remember, according to the Democracy Index, the United States is already deemed a “flawed democracy.” If we slip further into the autocratic range of the spectrum, it will have been a pretty short and sad run for a country that prides itself on representing freedom to the whole world. After all, we could only truly consider ourselves a democracy after the Voting Rights Act of 1965, making us a relatively young democracy compared to most others, like, for example, New Zealand, which as a self-governing colony became the first country in the world to adopt universal suffrage in 1893. We may like to pretend we were the grandfather of democracy, but for most of our existence, we were a democracy in name only. And calling yourself a democracy means nothing. To illustrate, Hitler and Mussolini were also quite fond of boasting about their “democracies.”

The Perils of American Democracy

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