![]() ![]() The indictment cites an internal comment in December 2020 by Trump’s deputy campaign manager Justin Clark, about the evolving plan to create fake electors: “The way this has morphed it’s a crazy play.” They preserve its forms while strangling its substance. Authoritarian movements seldom disavow democracy. The grotesque travesty of the Gettysburg Address to which Smith alludes in the indictment-the first time as republican tragedy, the second time as fascistic farce-points up the weirdly, and parodically, imitative nature of the conspiracies he unfolds. ![]() They did it badly, but if the mothership remains intact, next time it will beam down better shit. Trump and his co-conspirators attempted to obliterate American democracy by creating empty replicas of its procedures and its values. In that 1956 film, the aliens take on the exact likenesses of the humans they ingest, except that these duplicates are devoid of human meaning. Smith memorably cites a senior adviser to the Trump campaign whom he does not name but who has been widely identified as Jason Miller, complaining about the poor quality of the allegations of fraud on which Trump based his campaign to overturn the result of the election: “It’s tough to own any of this when it’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.” To develop Miller’s analogy, we might ask: What kind of alien invasion movie was this conspiracy? It was Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It will die because, were such impunity to be established, there would be every incentive not merely to repeat Trump’s botched coup of 2020, but to learn from its failure and refine its methods. Of the three criminal plots it alleges, the third is “a conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted.” What threat could be more fundamental? If such a scheme can go unpunished-especially when it is run by and for a president who has just been voted out of office-it will not be long before the American republic perishes from the earth. Yet it poses a genuinely existential question. ![]() His indictment is, in some respects, notably restrained: it does not charge Trump with sedition, insurrection, or direct incitement to violence in the January 6 assault on the Capitol. Smith’s legal prose is calm, cool, and precise. ![]() The question that Lincoln posed at Gettysburg was whether a democratic system of government “can long endure” in the US. The republic is indeed at stake in this indictment and the trial or trials that will result from it. This was-and is-true, but only in the sense that an arsonist calling “Fire!” even as he sets the building ablaze is telling the truth. He opened his speech by referring to “this most historic town” and “what happened 157 years ago last week.” He said that the final sentence of Lincoln’s address “captures why we are here today”: “That government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Mastriano warned that “everything is at stake…the republic is at stake.” (In 2022 Mastriano was the failed Republican gubernatorial candidate in the state.) It seems clear that Mastriano had chosen the location purposefully. This Gettysburg gathering was a one-sided public “hearing” into the conduct of the election in Pennsylvania, called by the far-right Republican state senator Doug Mastriano. As for Giuliani’s specific allegation about absentee ballots, Smith reports that “a Campaign staffer wrote internally that Co-Conspirator 1’s allegation was ‘just wrong’ and ‘There’s no way to defend it.’” It was at the Wyndham that the man Smith calls Co-Conspirator 1, Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph Giuliani, “falsely claimed that Pennsylvania had issued 1.8 million absentee ballots and received 2.5 million in return.” Trump himself addressed this gathering by phone from the Oval Office, claiming that “this was an election that we won easily.” As the indictment makes plain, Trump knew that this claim was a lie. It happened on November 25, 2020, the day after Pennsylvania’s governor had certified Joe Biden’s victory in the state’s presidential election. Smith cites, rather, a public event in the ballroom of the Wyndham Hotel in Gettysburg, a ten-minute drive from the cemetery where Lincoln spoke in honor of the Union dead. It is not, however, the one delivered by Abraham Lincoln on the Pennsylvania battlefield in 1863. In his indictment of Donald Trump for conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, the special counsel Jack Smith makes a glancing reference to the Gettysburg Address. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |