I'm watching Fox News today as the results of the Georgia Senate runoffs settle in, as Congress meets to certify the electoral collage votes while a moronic Republican strain performs its challenge to Biden's election, and as protesters in DC gather to pump up Trump and his GOP sycophants in Congress.
I'm doing it to get a more visceral sense of the national divide as we move into a new era. You may not be surprised by what you read, but you'll have details that will underscore the complexities of the road ahead.
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In speaking to the hordes in DC, Donald Trump, Jr. tried to jazz the crowd by punctuating something he said with "Amen." He followed with "A woman." Too cute apparently. He was loudly booed and tried to be quick on his feet by turning it around, saying that's how the Democrats would say it.
Right at 11 am Chicago time, Trump began his oration for his "Save America" rally. He opened by slamming the media, challenging them to show the hundreds of thousands of people who are there. On Fox News, they turned the cameras around and focused narrowly on the crowd. Viewers couldn't tell if there were dozens or hundreds or thousands in the crowd. Trump looked out, shielding his eyes from the sun and envisioned the crowd stretching beyond the Washington Monument. Maybe so. He's not one to be trusted on such matters.
He pledged to stop the steal. He boasted that he won the election in both 2016 and 2020. In 2020, he won by even more. A landslide. Does anybody believe that Biden had 80 million votes? A resounding, no. He complained that the military should be allowed to come up on the stage with him. He's counting on Pence to do the right thing - to make sure that the states should have to re-certify, then he'd be president. He rambled and got the crowd to chant almost at will for a while. He went after the weak Republicans - Romney, McConnell, Georgia Gov. Kemp, Liz Cheney, and any others who don't support the day's agenda to trash the electoral college voting.
[It was during this part of the rant that word leaked out that Biden is nominating Merrick Garland to be the Attorney General. Garland was the judge whom then-President Obama nominated for the Supreme Court to fill the vacancy left by Justice Scalia's death in 2016.]
Trump called on the crowd to march peacefully with him to the Capitol.
The chanting exploded when he called the late night voting results from state-to-state "bullshit." That got the crowd going. The chanting turned to "bullshit, bullshit." When he beseeched the crowd to applaud for Perdue and Loeffler, there was scant applauding. He tried to get the crowd to hoot and howl because he fought for increasing the covid relief package from $600 to $2,000. "Give em a couple of bucks," he said proudly. The crowd didn't go for it.
Where's Hillary? Later, where's Hunter? Not much response to either of those natural rousers.
Some of his preaching did hit the mark with the crowd. Mike Pence has to send the electoral college results back. The crowd came alive again. The chants rang out. "Send it back." Even "get rid of section 230" got some payback.
He warned the crowd he was going to lay out the case for fraud, and they don't mind staying on to listen, right? Murmurs at best. He asked again later. A handful of people responded. Some signaling yes; others no.
He was noticing that he was losing his people. It was hard to not see a crowd of people who were being held hostage in the cold. They had to stay on for the solidarity march to the Capitol.
As a standup performer, riffing around his notes, he can tell when a crowd is abandoning him. The trick for him at this point is to sense what will get them back. A few attempts took. Most didn't. What he was doing was warming up the crowd.
As he appeared to be moving toward an end, bemoaning that he could go on for hours regaling them with the unprecedented fraud, the crowd gave him the adoration he needed. "We love you," they chanted. He had another half hour in him, which he continued to use to foment the crowd about the illegitimacy of the Biden presidency.
[One hour after Trump opened his "Save America" rally, Congress convened in joint session. Vice President Pence reminded the congresspeople that debate will not be allowed in the session. The limited role of the session, he announced, is for both houses to verify that the certificates of the counts in the states are authentic and appropriate in form. They proceeded through the count state by state in alphabetical order.]
Fox News continued with Trump live, and the congressional session in an adjoining screen with the sound off. Fox News advised its audience that they will switch to the audio in Congress when the roll call gets to Arizona to show the objection to the Arizona electoral count. They did and Pence announced that the two houses will adjourn into separate sessions to debate the Arizona vote. Fox stayed with coverage of the congressional setting. When the session recessed, Fox News introduced a panel to debrief on it. Before they went to the panel, one of the Fox announcers underscored that Pence was standing loyally behind the president now and has at every turn. Another Fox announcer intervened to add that Pence issued a letter to Congress, indicating that he wasn't go to follow Trump's line in the sand.
I had no idea at this point if Trump was aware during the rally of the Garland nomination or of Pence's apparent shift in position to limiting his role and doing it against Trump's wishes.
Fox News would not return to the audio of Trump's rally. Their coverage would stay with the affairs of Congress. At one point, they showed in an adjoining screen the Trump rally moving to the hill and reported that in some cases, trying unsuccessfully to get into Congress.
As the GOP faction of Trumpers were making their case in both houses simultaneously, in the Senate, Mitch McConnell staked out a clear yet unexpected position that the election wasn't even close that it isn't Congress' role to nullify the votes of the electoral majority - of some 80 million people, of the states and of the many courts that have concluded that the voting was lawful. He reinforced that with all the objections to the elections state-by-state, the Trump forces have not managed to provide any evidence of fraud. He described the move by the small fraction of GOP Trumpers as pushing democracy into a "death spiral."
When Ted Cruz spoke in the Senate, he argued for an electoral commission to investigate for ten days the legitimacy of the elections in the swing states. He repeated his contention that half the country, not just Republicans, believe that the presidential election was rife with fraud. His point was that the public needs to be reassured that there was no fraud that would have changed the results.
Not for a moment did he consider the obvious indisputable truth. The huge numbers of the public, probably millions, who believe that the presidential election was rife with fraud believe it not based on any evidence but on the barrages of disinformation propagated by Trump, fellow Republicans, Fox News and their companions in the far right media. There is no guarantee, not even a likelihood, that Trump's band of miscreants will change their tunes or give up the ghost. As Trump put it before the rally ended, "We will never give up, we will never concede."
Shortly after Cruz spoke, all hell broke loose, or more accurately, all hell broke in. The crowd that seemed to swell off camera on the way from the mall to the hill had breached the meager law enforcement presence at the gates, entered the halls of Congress and begun strutting down the halls. Congress halted the proceedings and took cover.
All hell had broken in.
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