Wednesday, June 02, 2021

Run In Circles, Scream and Shout!

When I was in high school (I may have told you), a big fight broke out between blacks and whites. A huge paper banner had been hung on a brick wall about 20 feet high, and probably longer than it was high (memory fades with time) for the school rally to play our cross-town rival in football. Newly integrated into "Robert E. Lee High School," the black students forced to join a formerly all-white school set the banner on fire. No major risk to the school, which was all brick and glass; the paper burned up in a trice, more annoyance than risk to life and limb. Anyway, a fight broke out, and general chaos ensued.

Well, it did for the students on lunch break at the time (the school staggered four lunch breaks, IIRC).  People ran around scaring other people and throwing punches, etc.  I grabbed my wife, who was then my girfriend, and my friends on lunch break with me all fled to a friend's house nearby, convinced the school would soon be ablaze and we would return to find bodies scattered on the campus.

Hey, I was 17; drama is endemic to 17 year olds.

For the longest time I insisted the inciden was a "riot."  But people even then told me that, in riots, people died.  My girlfriend's sister was in class at that hour, and across the campus from where the sign was (it was near the cafeteria, again IIRC), so while they saw a few people running hither and thither, the whole event passed them by as if it had never happened.  I was convinced the campus was ablaze; they were wondering if something was going on.  In the end I think there were a couple of bloody lips.  The pity is, it didn't make the yearbook.  Censorship, ya know....

I mention this because "a nearly-successful deadly insurrection" wouldn't have left the Capitol after an hour or two, trooping out with "souvenirs" and taking selfies all along the way.  Had those rioters (yes, it was a riot) been intent on murder and real mayhem, they'd have come armed and they'd have barricaded themselves in while search systematically for people to "arrest" and kill.  There was no system to that mess.  Bad as it was, it could have been so much worse.

No reason for us to make it worse in retrospect.

That, and the answer to the question of "Why am I not reassured" in that tweet is stated in the first three quoted words:  "The former President."  Trump can declare himself Marie of Romania while he's at it, it will make as much difference as declaring himself the real winner of the election (pro tip:  he's been doing that since November 3rd.  We all just stopped listening a long time ago.)  He literally, in other words, doesn't have a mechanism for being "reinstalled as POTUS."  Partly, because no such mechanism exists.  Partly because he has no governmental power whatsoever anymore.

Let's go back to January 6 for a minute.  Trump spoke, the crowd responded and stormed the Capitol.  Is Trump responsible for incitement?  It's a legal question, and frankly rather hard to prove in court.  You're more likely to get a conviction against a BLM protestor than against a former POTUS; for rather obvious reasons.  So let's not haggle over the finer points of "incitement" in the law, and move on to what happened at the Capitol.
A "violent seizure of power" doesn't usually end with people strolling away from the building they just tried to "capture," taking souvenirs as they go.  In fact, a "violent seizure of power" usually ends with dead bodies of elected government officials and some declaration of a revolution.  I'm not downplaying the violence at the Capitol, but the charges so far are essentially trespass and unlawful entry.  The most serious charges are interfering with the function of Congress.  Granted, that's a serious crime; but it's not exactly sedition, or revolution.  A "seizure of power" would have been the deposition of the Congress and a declaration that Trump was President again.  The crowd didn't even try that hard to find the Representatives and Senators.  What they did was bad enough; let's not inflate it into the French Revolution.

As for Trump being reinstated, and just his saying so representing a threat to the very existence of democratic governance, let's get real here:  the President holds office by the consent of the governed and the agreement of the rest of the government.  The rest of the government, from the courts to the Congress, agree that Joe Biden is the duly elected President of the United States.  Trump tried to buffalo his way back into office when he actually held it, and still had all the powers of that "bully pulpit."  Especially compared to those days, the crazed nonsense from Michael Flynn or Sidney Powell or OANN or Tucker Carlson or the "Cyber Ninjas" of today is of no force or effect whatsoever.  As I said earlier, even the Q-Anon crazies don't really want to so much as get their hair mussed.  They expect salvation to ride in on a white horse and scatter their enemies like nine pins and restore truth, justice, and the American way to America.  They just want to be sure they have a chair from which to watch it.  They don't so much as want to get a parade permit and march in a street on a slow weekend afternoon.  Do some of them support violent action to achieve their ends?  Sure; as long as they get to see it from the sidelines.

And Trump?  He's ended his blog, because people were laughing at him about it.  He's reportedly going to "rally" at a state GOP meeting, which means he doesn't have to pay and can maybe even fundraise and so, get paid (the way Trump likes it:  all the money comes in, none goes out).  There are promised rallies beyond that, but seeing is believing.  Trump is already grousing about the legal fees he's having to pay, which means lawyers know to get it upfront.  Cities and facilities will make the same demand.  My guess is, unless Trump can latch on to an event already paid for by somebody else, he's not leaving the golf course anytime soon.

Mechanisms, ya know.  He doesn't have them anymore.  It makes a difference.
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