WE WILL PUT THE PIG OUT ON HIS ASS!!!
Tape reveals Trump gangster methods in pursuing election coup
In an hour-long telephone conversation Saturday, leaked to the media and first made public Sunday by the Washington Post, President Donald Trump tried to bully the Georgia secretary of state into overturning the result of the presidential election in his state, which was won by Democrat Joe Biden.
“I just want to find 11,780 votes,” Trump told Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia official. That is one more than the margin of 11,779 votes by which Biden won the state’s 16 electoral votes. Raffensperger rejected the plea, declaring that he stood by the result of the vote, which has been recounted twice, including a hand recount of all ballots run through voting machines.
Trump threatened Raffensperger and his general counsel, Ryan Germany, with criminal prosecution for allegedly covering up acts of vote fraud in their state. He claimed that he had actually won the state by hundreds of thousands of votes, and that a defeat there was impossible. “The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry,” he declared. “And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.” Raffensperger responded: “Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong.”
Trump used the language of a Mafia gangster in referring to a female election worker in Fulton County (Atlanta), who has been demonized on right-wing social media and repeatedly threatened after false allegations by the Trump campaign that she had triple-counted a stack of ballots from the heavily Democratic area.
After Raffensperger reiterated that there was no evidence of such actions and that Trump was mistaken, the president responded:
“So what are we going to do here folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break. You know, we have that in spades already. Or we can keep it going but that’s not fair to the voters of Georgia because they’re going to see what happened and they’re going to see what happened. I mean, I’ll, I’ll take on to anybody you want with regard to [name of election worker] and her lovely daughter, a very lovely young lady, I’m sure.”
This is nothing less than a threat of physical violence against the election worker—whose name has been withheld—and her child, coming from the president of the United States, the “commander-in-chief” of a vast military and police apparatus, as well as the leader of the Republican Party, which is increasingly taken on the coloration of a fascist movement.
Who leaked the tape of the telephone conversation has not been made public. It could well have been officials on the Georgia end of the call, seeking to insure themselves against Trump putting his violent threats into practice. Equally likely, the leak could come from within the military-intelligence apparatus itself, which monitors all US telephone conversations and previously leaked Trump’s phone call to the president of Ukraine, which led to his impeachment a year ago.
Whatever its source, the tape is ample evidence—if more were needed—for the indictment and prosecution of Donald Trump for conspiracy to overthrow the US Constitution and establish a presidential dictatorship. His co-conspirators would include White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who participated in the call, and several Trump campaign lawyers and aides.
Joining in as accomplices are a majority of congressional Republicans in Washington. As of Sunday, at least 140 Republican members of the House of Representatives had announced they would support a challenge of electoral votes cast by several states when Congress meets in a joint session January 6 to receive and count the ballots.
A dozen Republican senators have issued statements saying they would support such a challenge as well. Under the Constitution, any challenge to the electoral votes of any state must be supported by at least one member of the House and one member of the Senate. The two houses then must meet separately and vote on the challenges. These are expected to fail, given that Democrats have a majority in the House and many Republicans in the Senate have already conceded Biden’s victory.
But it is unprecedented in American history that a sitting president is refusing to concede after what is close to a landslide defeat, by a margin of seven million votes, and that the majority of his own party continues to treat the election as illegitimate and seeks to overturn it.
The statements issued by Republican congressmen and senators backing Trump’s challenge to the election have openly espoused an authoritarian political perspective. The lawsuit filed by Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas, for example, declared that Vice President Pence, who will act as presiding officer at Wednesday’s joint session of Congress, has the authority to throw out a state’s electors and choose a competing slate, or discard a state’s electoral votes entirely.
The extraordinary level of tension within US ruling circles is revealed by the letter published Sunday evening, also in the Washington Post, by all ten living secretaries of defense, rejecting Trump’s claims of fraud and calling on Congress to engage in the formal counting of votes Wednesday and confirm Biden’s victory in the Electoral College.
The bulk of the statement is directed to top civilian officials and military officers, warning them against any interference in the election. “Efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory,” the statement reads. “Civilian and military officials who direct or carry out such measures would be accountable, including potentially facing criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic.”
These words are all the more ominous given that one of the ten signatories, Mark Esper, was just fired by Trump in November, in part because of his opposition to Trump’s call to deploy the armed forces to suppress the mass demonstrations against police violence that erupted after the police murder of George Floyd last May 25. There have been open discussions in the White House about invoking the Insurrection Act—as Trump threatened to do last summer—to enforce a post-election coup that would maintain Trump in office.
Besides Esper, the signers include his predecessor, retired General James Mattis; Donald Rumsfeld, co-architect of the Iraq War; and his partner in crime Dick Cheney, secretary of defense under President George H. W. Bush before he became vice president for George W. Bush. Joining them were Robert Gates, William Perry, Leon Panetta, Ashton Carter, Chuck Hagel and William Cohen.
This group of war criminals of both parties, Democrats and Republicans, warns against military interference in the transfer of power because they regard Biden as a safe pair of hands for the affairs of American imperialism, and because they fear that further efforts by Trump to remain in office could provoke an unprecedented outpouring of political opposition from the American working class. This under conditions where thousands are dying every day from the coronavirus pandemic, and millions face unemployment, poverty and homelessness.
In the midst of this deepening social, economic and political crisis, the dominant sections of the ruling elite regard Biden, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, and their cabinet nominees, drawn entirely from the corporate and national-security establishment, as a more viable means of maintaining their class rule.
For their part, the Democrats are doing everything possible to downplay the significance of Trump’s actions and propel their 78-year-old president-elect across the finish line of Inauguration Day without a complete breakdown of the US constitutional order. Even at this point, barely two weeks away, a Biden succession is not a certainty.
Trump’s actions and his demeanor in the phone call have a whiff of desperation, but the threats to democratic rights are intensifying. The president has summoned fascistic supporters like the Proud Boys to come to Washington on January 6, and he has promised to join them in the streets, giving support to the efforts of his henchmen inside the Capitol, as they “object” to the votes cast by the American people.
Whatever the immediate outcome, the replacement of Trump by Biden in the White House would not mark the end of the political crisis, but only the beginning of a new and more explosive chapter. Trump is not playing by the rules of conventional American politics, and the Republican Party, increasingly under his personal control, is being transformed into the instrument of an authoritarian fascist movement.
If the Trump tape confirms anything, it is that the very presence of this gangster in the White House is an indictment of the American political system, its ruling elite, and its political-media establishment.
It was the Democratic Party, through the right-wing policies of the Obama administration and the right-wing campaign of Hillary Clinton, that paved the way for Trump. It was the Democratic Party, through its right-wing anti-Russia campaign, that sought to channel all popular opposition to the Trump administration behind its reactionary foreign policy agenda. And it is the Democratic Party which is seeking to blind the American people to the dangerous implications of the current political crisis.
Pentagon brass on “red alert” over Trump’s coup plotting
The senior US military command is operating at what amounts to a state of high alert in anticipation of a possible coup attempt by President Donald Trump over the next month aimed at overturning the results of the November presidential election.
This heightened sense of danger was triggered by an extraordinary December 17 interview given by Gen. Michael Flynn (ret.), Trump’s first national security adviser and now pardoned felon, to Newsmax, the far-right cable television outlet that has faithfully backed Trump’s fraudulent claims of a stolen election.
Flynn asserted the president’s power to declare martial law and suggested that he could deploy “military capabilities” in the swing states where he lost to “basically rerun an election.” In other words, voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia and other “battleground” states where Democratic candidate Joe Biden won would be herded back to the polls at the point of a bayonet to ensure that they sustained Trump’s grip on the White House.
Even more ominously, the retired three-star general was invited to the White House the next day—along with Sydney Powell, Trump’s former election fraud lawyer who pushed theories that the vote had been rigged by, among others, the deceased Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez—where the feasibility of imposing martial law was the subject of a heated debate.
The extraordinary tension within the Pentagon’s top brass has been made clear over the past several days in a series of reports by media commentators with close ties to the US military-intelligence apparatus.
Prominent among these warnings is a Washington Post column by David Ignatius titled “Until Biden’s win is certified, the US remains vulnerable.” Ignatius has long served as a conduit for information that the Pentagon and the CIA want leaked to the public.
The United States “will be in the danger zone until the formal certification of Joe Biden’s election victory on Jan. 6, because potential domestic and foreign turmoil could give President Trump an excuse to cling to power,” Ignatius writes.
On January 6, Congress is scheduled to formally count the vote of the Electoral College, which Biden won 306 to 232, and certify his election as president of the United States. Trump has called for his Republican supporters in the House and Senate to derail this process, while summoning his far-right supporters to take to the streets of Washington the same day. “Big protest in DC on January 6th. Be there it will be wild!” he tweeted, raising the specter of violence.
Violent confrontations in the streets of the US capital, Ignatius warns, could provide Trump with the pretext to “invoke the Insurrection Act to mobilize the military.”
Ignatius also points to Trump’s purge of the Pentagon’s top civilian leadership and installation of a cabal of fascistic loyalists. Acting Secretary of Defense Mark Esper was sacked both because of his reluctance to support a military strike against Iran and for his public opposition to Trump’s proposal to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy regular Army troops in the streets to attack anti-police violence demonstrations last summer.
“Trump’s final weeks in office will also be a tinder box because of the danger of turmoil abroad,” writes Ignatius, pointing to recent rocket attacks on the sprawling US embassy complex in Baghdad’s Green Zone and Trump’s tweeted threat of retaliation against Iran. He also cites the January 3 anniversary of last year’s US drone assassination of senior Iranian leader Qassem Suleimani and Iraqi militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.
The reality is that the US is steadily escalating its military threats against Iran. In the latest action, the US Navy has sent the nuclear-powered submarine USS Georgia, armed with cruise missiles, along with accompanying warships into the Persian Gulf, joining the USS Nimitz carrier strike group already deployed there.
Donald Trump Challenges Tom Cotton: How Can You Certify ‘Wrong’ Election
President Donald Trump challenged Sen. Tom Cotton Monday after the Arkansas senator said he would not join Republican colleagues in opposing certification of the electoral votes on January 6.
“How can you certify an election when the numbers being certified are verifiably WRONG,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “You will see the real numbers tonight during my speech, but especially on JANUARY 6th.”
How can you certify an election when the numbers being certified are verifiably WRONG. You will see the real numbers tonight during my speech, but especially on JANUARY 6th. @SenTomCotton Republicans have pluses & minuses, but one thing is sure, THEY NEVER FORGET!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 4, 2021
Trump appeared angry at Cotton for choosing not to join a growing group of Senate Republicans who would oppose the certified electoral results in select states.
Cotton argued that Senators opposing the results of the 2020 Electoral College would “establish unwise precedents” in future elections.
“[O]bjecting to certified electoral votes won’t give him a second term—it will only embolden those Democrats who want to erode further our system of constitutional government,” Cotton wrote in a statement explaining his decision.
President Trump warned that Republicans would not forget Cotton’s choice, while senators like Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and Marsha Blackburn announced their intentions to object to the vote certification.
“Republicans have pluses and minuses, but one thing is sure, THEY NEVER FORGET!” he wrote.
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