Opinion

Last Friday, appearing before the Federalist Society in Florida, former Vice President Mike Pence said the words that dare not be uttered in the Republican Party: "President Trump was wrong." He was referring to Trump's recent assertion that Pence had the right to "overturn" the election. While Trump's original statement and Pence's mild rebuke both sent shock waves through the media, they really shouldn't have. Of course Trump thinks Pence had the right to overturn the election. He couldn't have been any clearer in the 5,789 times he's mentioned it.

No one should be surprised that Pence came out and said Trump was wrong, either. He has stayed pretty quiet about the whole thing, but the fact that Pence didn't actually try to throw out electoral votes, under tremendous pressure, proved long ago that he thought it was impossible and unjustified. He just didn't have the guts to come out and say it directly until now, which is typical.

In the year-plus since the events of Jan. 6, 2021, the Republican Party has morphed, like an evil insect emerging from a chrysalis, into its final form: a terrorist organization. Rather than purging from its ranks those Republicans who supported, endorsed and participated in Donald Trump's coup attempt, the party and its leaders have rallied around them, and remade the party in their image. Rather than voting to impeach and convict Donald Trump, and therefore drive him out of the party, Republican leaders, along with the bulk of their voters and their mouthpieces in the media, have chosen to support him.

Republicans are so loyal to Donald Trump that even after the attack on the Capitol, where Republican members of Congress could easily have been killed — 147 of them voted to nullify the results of the 2020 presidential election. In essence, they were completing the "legal" part of Trump's coup, even after the illegal part had failed (at least in that moment).

Last week, ex-president Karen reminded us that it’s so hard to get good help nowadays. Donald Trump asserted January 30 that Mike Pence had the power to overturn the election and lamented that he didn’t do it. “Unfortunately, [Pence] didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!” Trump wrote in a statement.

The ensuing flood of negative attention was so intoxicating Trump upped the ante. Like an aggrieved customer leaving a bad Seamless review, he proclaimed that Congress should investigate Pence for failing to steal the election for him.

The so-called “freedom convoy” has captured worldwide attention as a minority of truckers and their supporters have asserted their right to assemble and oppose COVID-19 protocols imposed by the federal, provincial and territorial governments. No problem there.

The problem lies in what’s not being said or acknowledged.

Sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying, or screaming, or burrowing into the Earth to live out the rest of your days as a mole person subsisting on roots and grubs. Life is constantly providing reminders of this, mainly in the form of influential entities doing exactly what they should not do. This week's example was brought to us by the announcement that Rudy Giuliani was revealed as a contestant on the upcoming seventh season of "The Masked Singer."

This article first appeared in Salon.

It makes for chilling reading, but it’s entirely necessary. Recently, yet another former FBI agent blew the whistle on the deadly and growing threat posed by white supremacist extremism in the United States.

Scott, whose full name Rolling Stone decided to keep in confidence, was an undercover spy for the FBI. He infiltrated far-right domestic terror groups over decades. His work is not for the faint-hearted.

There are lots of versions of the story I can tell about how I transitioned from the Republicanism of my childhood to become a progressive in my late teens: critical thinking skills, education, relocation from a small town to liberal Austin, Texas. But likely the truest story is the simplest one: The left was a lot more fun.

The progressive world had better music, more interesting books, and entertaining parties. Feminism interwove political discourse with pop culture, fashion, and sex. Liberalism was an ideology that promoted curiosity, beauty, humor, and freedom — so totally unlike the small-minded and boring conservatives I grew up around. When I think about attracting people to the left now and getting them motivated, however, I have to admit that it no longer seems so obvious that liberals are the fun ones.

Two and a half years ago, Special Counsel Robert Muller submitted his report in which he declared that Donald Trump did not engage in a criminal conspiracy with agents of the Russian government who had interfered in the 2016 election on his behalf. Numerous members of Trump's campaign were indicted on various related and unrelated charges, but the special prosecutors were never able to gather enough evidence of a conspiracy. While Trump had behaved in extremely suspicious ways, investigators simply couldn't prove that he knew what the Russian government was doing.

Trump went on to spend his entire term committing overt acts of corruption, combining his business with his duties and openly defying all ethical restrictions against conflicts of interest. He blatantly obstructed justice many times and was even impeached for abusing his power by attempting to sabotage his political rival's presidential campaign. He broke the law repeatedly and got away with it every time.

The big news this week wasn't really news at all, but rather confirmation of what we already knew. After a rally of supporters last Saturday in Conroe, Texas, the former president admitted for the first time that his goal was to have his Vice President, Mike Pence, "overturn the election."

Well, whoop-de-do. Pundits call that "saying the quiet part out loud," one of those phrases that is so meaningless it should be put in a bottle, sent out on the Japanese current and retired forever. There was never a "quiet part" with Donald Trump. He came right out and told you what he was doing nearly every day. Once he woke up on the morning of Nov. 4, 2020, all he did was try to overturn the election. He claimed repeatedly that he had "won by a landslide" even after election results came in showing him losing by more than 7 million votes overall, and by 74 votes in the Electoral College.

To anyone who was watching the events of January 6 unfold live on television, one thing was quite clear: Donald Trump was excited and proud about the violence he incited.

As the timeline of his actions that day shows, he was so wound up tweeting invective at Congress and his vice president, Mike Pence, that he barely slept the night before. Once the riot was underway, Trump spent hours resisting the pressure to call off his dogs, instead tweeting more invective and ass-covering calls to "stay peaceful" that the crowd knew not to take seriously. He was also reportedly gleefully entranced by the footage of the insurrection. After three hours of rioting, he finally told the crowd to "go home" — but only after it was clear that the riot wasn't going to overturn the election.

Like his buddy Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump is a thug willing to use violence to achieve what he cannot achieve by legitimate means. He has shown a willingness to do so in the past, and because he himself has paid no price, he is threatening to do so in the future.

We know all this, because we have witnessed it. In those anxious days and weeks leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, it had become clear to many of us that Trump saw mob violence as a means to try to keep himself in the White House, in defiance of the eviction notice served upon him by the American people. But at the time, some were not willing to hear what their own ears were telling them, what Trump’s own words were communicating.

Every day, Donald Trump becomes more his horrible true self. He commands the loyalty of tens of millions of people. He does not even pretend to be a statesman who loves America. He is a political cult leader, a sociopath and a model of antisocial and dangerous behavior. As psychologists and other public health experts have warned, Trump has "infected" many of his most loyal followers with the same mental pathologies.

Trump has an erotic attachment to violence, as do many of his followers. They are tied together by the Big Lie and other sadistic, and anti-human fictions. TrumpWorld is a malignant and vile alternate universe — one that longs to devour and consume the world as it actually exists.

With the anniversary of the Jan. 6 attacks now behind us, perhaps the most important question facing our nation is whether our systems of accountability are capable of punishing those who sought to overthrow our constitutional democracy — and preventing them from doing it again.

I am not talking about the people who stormed the U.S. Capitol building or assaulted police officers. Many of them already have faced, or soon will face, the justice they deserve. I'm talking about the people who tried, using legal theories, public and private pressure and official powers, to overturn an election — the powerful people who inspired the violent insurrectionists at the Capitol that day. We can call this group, which includes former President Donald Trump and his cadre of congressional enablers, "white-collar insurrectionists."