Countdown to a Coup
Since the start of Gaslit Nation in 2018, we've warned of Trump's determination to use violence to consolidate power and stay in power. The earth-shaking 2016 election was the culmination of a coup, and the rampant corruption, purging, threats, harassment of investigators, whistleblowers, and law enforcement that followed was done to ensure that coup successfully entrenched a dictatorship. January 6, 2021 was inevitable, and yes, we even announced a special episode about it in advance. Our democracy cannot survive another coup.
In this special episode, we provide a montage of Gaslit Nation episodes going back to the beginning, counting down to the violent coup attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The countdown continues, and that our democracy currently cannot handle a third coup attempt by Trump and his white supremacist army currently harassing and threatening school boards over the teaching of Black history and vaccine and mask mandates, harassing and threatening election officials over Trump's Big Lie and to ensure their efforts to overturn our democracy are successful next time, and running for office at all levels using disinformation and white rage. This episode is an SOS for our democracy, calling on our public servants and law enforcement to clean up corruption (especially among law enforcement), secure our democracy, and ensure there will be no third coup, one our democracy will not survive.
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[Intro theme music]
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm Sarah Kendzior, the author of the bestsellers, The View from Flyover Country and Hiding in Plain Sight and of the upcoming book, They Knew, out in 2022.
Andrea Chalupa:
I'm Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones, about Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine.
Sarah Kendzior:
And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the United States and rising autocracy around the world.
Andrea Chalupa:
What you're about to hear is a montage of clips of Gaslit Nation taken from the very start of our show when we warned of Trump inciting political violence to overthrow our democracy. It concludes, of course, with Sarah and I announcing in advance our special episode to cover the January 6th coup, which we saw coming. And so did the FBI, which could have stopped it but didn't, which means we need a cultural and structural overhaul of the FBI, starting with the firing of Christopher Wray, to ensure President Biden completes his pledge of making the fight of corruption a national security priority. Alright? Consider this episode an urgent reminder that 2016 was the culmination of a coup, not the start of one, and those same coup plotters inevitably tried to plan another coup to stay in power and install a dictatorship. This coup was centrally planned and coordinated. The same perpetrators are the ones who were investigated—and many indicted—as part of Robert Mueller's Russia investigation, and if they're not brought to justice for both the 2016 coup as well as the 2021 coup, well, with no accountability, you know what they say: The third time’s the charm. If what you hear in this episode makes you angry, then go check out the Gaslit Nation Action Guide on gaslitnationpod.com and join a community or donate to organizations on the frontline of protecting our democracy. Channel that anger we all share into direct action and be the hope we need in the world.
Sarah Kendzior:
Exactly. I just wanna add that it's very important to remember who knew what and when, because what is predictable is preventable. And in this regard, chronology is key to battling autocracy. And so you're going to hear, year by year, month by month, how we got to that dire point. So, uh, happy holidays everybody.
Andrea Chalupa:
Happy holidays.
Andrea Chalupa:
July 23, 2018. (Harry Reid, Access Hollywood, and the Comey Chameleon)
Clip from Joy Reid: Steve Bannon,Trump's new campaign CEO, joins Team Trump from his job as Chairman of Breitbart News where, as Vanity Fair reports, Bannon helped create "the political philosophy and the political army-in-waiting that has been the engine for Trump's astonishing rise in American politics." The announcement was welcomed by members of the so-called Alt-Right, who the Daily Beast writes this week, "see in Bannon a media friendly, ethno-nationalist fellow traveler".
Sarah Kendzior: One thing to understand about how Trump operates is that no one ever really leaves. You see the same cast of characters coming up again and again, and part of that is because of the "loyalty” that Trump values, which is really a mafia-style loyalty of omerta, of blackmail, and of control. And so Manafort is official gone-
Andrea Chalupa: Mafia loyalty.
Sarah Kendzior: Yeah, it's mafia loyalty. Trump has kept this lifelong kind of coterie of miscreants surrounding him ever since the late '70s onwards. He values loyalty, if you want to think of it that way. But it's not loyalty that's based on respect; it's a mafia-style loyalty based on mutual corruption, intimidation, and fear. So while Manafort is technically gone, he resurfaced in December and was still lurking in the background, but we'll get to that. Steve Bannon came in to officially replace Manafort two days before Manafort departed. That was significant in that Bannon, of course, knew how to really work the media because of his history in Breitbart, and so these kinds of propaganda tactics that we'd seen throughout the campaign of lies, of constant attacking, of manipulation of media entities, went into just full throttle. One of those tactics was to ramp up the contribution of yet another former campaign manager, Roger Stone, who played an important role at this time. It's important to remember that by August, the majority of America was convinced that Trump was going to lose. I was not in this majority. I thought he still had a chance, but I definitely thought he had hurt himself through the disastrous Republican National Convention and through just a series of missteps; insulting veterans, feuding with babies, you name it, he did it.
Sarah Kendzior: I know. It's like we forget he feuded with a baby.
Andrea Chalupa: Could you unpack that a little bit more? What was the-
Sarah Kendzior: He feuded with a damn baby!
Andrea Chalupa: What was the feud again? Did the baby say he’s not really rich?
Sarah Kendzior: The feud was that the baby ... I mean, actually, I mean this is horrifying in retrospect of what's happening today with these children. A woman brought her baby to a Trump campaign rally. Trump yelled at the baby, said, "Get that baby outta here." People thought he was joking because who the hell says that to a prospective voter with a child? And he's like, "I'm not joking." And that is how Trump treats children, so it's ... I mean it's, unfortunately, it's worth pointing out. It sounds absurd, but the seeds of his attitudes were always apparent. On that note, this is a somewhat frightening time. This is the time people started discussing the "alt-right"—which is a nice word for white supremacists—in detail. Roger Stone had become very active in proclaiming that if Trump loses it's, One, because the election is rigged, and Two, therefore there will be a bloodbath. So people were looking at the rise of militias, they were looking at the rise of hate groups, and they were predicting that Trump would lose and that this would happen.
Sarah Kendzior:
August 7th, 2018. (Robert Mueller and the Iron Triangles)
Andrea Chalupa:
The dapper Nazi articles.
Sarah Kendzior:
The dapper Nazi began to appear everyone as fashion sense, the fact that he’s just like us. And amazingly, I think that they all thought Hillary was going to win and then we'd be dealing with this sort of Nazi uprising on the fringe, trying to move towards the center. Instead, we get Nazis in the White House. We get Steve Bannon, we get Steve Miller. We get people...
Andrea Chalupa: The Stephen Miller who's still in the White House ... And they're destroying lives and they're destroying families.
Sarah Kendzior: Yeah. They're dictating policy, dictating policy that is very much like Nazi Germany in terms of how they treat immigrants and it's a serious problem. The New York Times does not think it's a serious problem. They wrote an article praising Stephen Miller and published it purposefully on Holocaust Remembrance Day. That was this year.
Andrea Chalupa: It's impossible. So the thing is the fact that we keep jumping to the present, even though we're trying to talk through 2016, just underlines the fact of how everything from that year is unfortunately still so current.
Sarah Kendzior: Yes.
Andrea Chalupa: We're still repeating these patterns of abuse in the media.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yes.
Andrea Chalupa:
And the Nazis are still in power. That's why when you talk about 2016, you're talking about 2018 and unfortunately, I'm sure, 2019.
Sarah Kendzior: And a lot of it has to do with how people accept different narratives and what they're willing to believe is true, and I think that there's this unwillingness to believe that the worst can happen in every respect, that Trump could win the primary, that he could win the general [election], that he would carry out these policies. And here we are two years later with, I think, the most viscerally upsetting of all of his policies, which is the separation of children from parents, you know, the abuse of children in these camps.
Andrea Chalupa: You and I cried today talking about this.
Sarah Kendzior: So of course we can't get past that because you look at these moments and how it was preventable. And it's been preventable for two years but people continue to refuse to admit the truth. They refuse to admit the worst can happen and in doing so, they ensure that it does. And that's what, I'm hoping at least, with this podcast, with other stuff we do, we at least can get across that, Yes, the worst can happen, yes it will happen from people you think you trust, institutions you think you trust.
Andrea Chalupa: Democracy is fragile. Institutions are fragile.
Sarah Kendzior: Unless people step up.
Andrea Chalupa:
August 7th, 2018. (Robert Mueller and the Iron Triangles)
Andrea Chalupa: Finally, Election Day, the day when we're all like, "Finally it's over. Hillary is going to be President. First woman President. Victory-
Sarah Kendzior: Although even those who thought Hillary would win, I think people were bracing for civil war. I wasn't sure. I felt like it was going to be like 2000, which is what it was. It was like 2000. But I thought that it was going to linger on in a new horrific way, even if Hillary won.
Andrea Chalupa: Right. You're exactly right. Thank you so much for, yeah ... Because what we had was the same thing you had in the UK under Brexit. You had the right-wing media getting their racist deplorable base frothy in the mouth. They really triggered the racism in their base and you had…And that resulted in the murder of Jo Cox, who was a bright star, who could have really done a lot of good for her country and was taken too soon. So we had one murder as a result of their operation. And so what we feared in the US, they were repeating. The right-wing propaganda machine was repeating the same formula.
Sarah Kendzior: And they were arming up. And that's the thing-
Andrea Chalupa: Yes.
Sarah Kendzior: I live in Missouri-
Andrea Chalupa: Their base were like brownshirts.
Sarah Kendzior: I was watching people because I was covering the campaigns. You know, people invest money in all of this gear. They go to stores. There's a store here called Tactical Shit. People were going there and buying weaponry for what they thought was a new civil war. And I'm not saying a lot of people were doing this. It really wasn't that many people. You don't need that many people to cause an incredible amount of trouble.
Andrea Chalupa: Exactly.
Sarah Kendzior: There were Trump fans off, you know, near Kansas City, who were planning to blow up an apartment of Somali immigrants in retaliation for what they thought to be a rigged election. So, that's what I was sort of bracing for unless Trump won. And then if Trump won I was like, "We are going to be ..." And I don't wanna say a Russian proxy state, but I was like, "We are going to be dominated by Russia." And the country freaks out.
Andrea Chalupa: But you have Pizzagate already in effect, so when the Russians stole the Democrats’ emails and leaked them through Wikileaks, there were doctored emails claiming that John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, was part of this pedophile ring being ran out of a popular family pizza parlor called Comet Ping Pong in Washington DC in a neighborhood where a lot of influential people in media and in government happen to live nearby. And one of the owners had a connection to Clinton. And even though this place had no basement, this whole massive whirlwind of a conspiracy theory, the flames of which were being fanned by Michael Flynn and his son on Twitter and elsewhere and being amplified as well by Russian bots, you know, Russian propaganda and far-right propaganda. And all of it led to, of course, a violent conclusion where a young man from North Carolina drove up and shot up the pizza place with families inside eating. And someone could have been killed. So, that is Pizzagate, which shows that once again—as we've seen in Ukraine, as we've seen in Syria, as we've now seen in America and as we saw, of course in the UK, with Jo Cox—propaganda kills. And again we have to go back to that Harvard study that said that far-right media controlled the narrative in this election. And that the New York Times played into that and amplified far-right media and helped legitimize it.
Sarah Kendzior:
August 7th, 2018. (Robert Mueller and the Iron Triangles)
Andrea Chalupa:
And everything he's saying is amplifying Russian propaganda. They're all in lockstep with each other. And then you have Wikileaks that is, like, a hero of the left.
Sarah Kendzior:
Mmhmm <affirmative>
Andrea Chalupa:
The Ed Snowden Left, who's dropping all these bombshells in the name of transparency, even though it's like he's getting all this hacked material from the Kremlin, which is one of the most authoritarian regimes in the world today. And then you had these well-funded backers of Betsy DeVos and others, you know, these billionaires. We have deep systemic rot that allowed this perfect storm to happen in the first place. So we're not, you know, Sarah and I aren't seeing Russians everywhere. We're seeing the American cancer everywhere. And the fact that a determined, hostile regime was able to take advantage of our many weaknesses that had for so long gone untreated. That's it.
Andrea Chalupa:
January 30th, 2019. (Roger Stone: Democracy’s Undertaker)
Sarah Kendzior:
Indict Bannon now, because he's on a Fascist World Tour and he's not going to come back to the US possibly if he knows that he is being sought, but he's also causing incredible damage in real time and has been causing incredible damage for the last two years. And, you know, I have the same feeling about Roger Stone which is, like, you’ve got 40 years of political damage right there. Indict them sooner. It is not some sort of like, “Let's get even, let's get vengeance.” Iit is a public safety issue. These guys are running around, they're threatening people, they're threatening bloodbaths, they're working with hostile foreign agents, they're rigging elections. They need to be locked up because otherwise they're going to hurt people. But instead of locking up Roger Stone, Roger Stone was freed on a $250,000 bond and went right back to lying on cable news that evening showing that the mainstream media has learned absolutely nothing.
Sarah Kendzior:
April 14th, 2019. (Impeach Normalization)
Andrea Chalupa:
You can live in authoritarian regimes. You can carry on with your life. There are comedians that will entertain you. There's all sorts of stuff that could happen. Like, in my grandfather's memoir, he wrote about, you know, stand-up comics are coming around, are entertaining the kids, you know, young men and women his age, in his age group, that were supposed to be inspired by the communist regime to build this new communist regime.The good times still exist. It's just when they're killing people around you and people are disappearing around you. When human rights abuses are being carried out in your name and your country's doing that, you don't have anything that you can say against it. You just keep your head down and you live and you hope they don't come for you. And then you have to make the decision: Do I stay away from these people? Because those people over there might expose me to risk, violence against me, against my own government. You're forced to make decisions. You're forced to shut down. So, if you think that all sounds extreme, remember that we were the alarmists that were laughed at. That was us for a very long time. And so we're telling you now that the end game, 10, 20 years from now, if we don't turn this around in a very big way, if we don't flush people out of our system in a very big way, and we don't accept that you absolutely cannot negotiate with the Republican Party, we might be in very big danger here.
Andrea Chalupa:
October 16th, 2019. (Fraud Guarantee: Ukraine, Syria, and the Trump Crime Catastrophe)
Andrea Chalupa:
The Trump Crime Family is leveraging its cult of Evangelical followers and its white supremacist militias as its own brownshirts. They're leveraging these far-right extremists, whether it's religious or just about good old-fashioned racism. That's how they're threatening us, saying if you dare to hold us accountable, we're going to unleash vigilantes and militia mobs after you.
Sarah Kendzior:
February 29th, 2020. (How to Trump-proof and Putin-proof Our Democracy)
Andrea Chalupa:
Once again: Donald Trump stole the 2016 election with of Putin’s mass murdering mafia state. We're up against an actual mafia posing as a theocracy, because they need to have their diehard evangelicals—their doomsday cult—acting as their brownshirts in order to control and suppress us. That's what's coming next. Here in New York, I know a family that's had to ask themselves, When will they leave the country? What line will be crossed that would signal to them that it's time to pack up and move out of the United States?
Andrea Chalupa:
And for them, it was if Roe versus Wade is overturned, which is a clear sign of an autocratic theocracy finally cementing its powers, because one of the things that autocratic regimes do is they suppress women. They shove women back into the home. Why? Because women are on the front lines of fighting for human rights, fighting for the children's future. So, of course, if you control the women, then you control dissent. That's it. And so we cannot… I mean, I understand that, you know, we're gonna have a vigorous debate in this conversation today and people are having this across the country, but let's keep in mind that while we are having a very colorful Democratic primary, one that I think is descending into the petty chaos of a condo board meeting, we do have to keep in mind that actual authoritarianism is strengthening in our country.
Andrea Chalupa:
It is strengthening. The coup is nearly complete. And if they steal the electoral college again, it's gonna take a generation of great sacrifice to undo that.
Andrea Chalupa:
May 14th, 2020. (Show Trials)
Andrea Chalupa:
They're always accusing the other side of doing what they're doing, like “Crooked Hillary”. I would give anything for Hillary Clinton to be president right now. I would sleep at night. We probably wouldn't have a pandemic. She was in Obama's White House. Obama stopped the Ebola pandemic. He laser focused on it and put a stop to that. We might all be... you know, Sarah and I might have finally gotten our vacation. [laughs] Who cares about that now, obviously. But I mean, so what I'm saying is, they project. They've always projected and so you have to wonder now about Pizzagate and how much of their obsession of pedophilia came from their own culture, their own crimes.
Sarah Kendzior: Right.
Andrea Chalupa: Being in the ether of all these creepy people. And what they did by driving that Pizzagate conspiracy is they made the target on Hillary Clinton's head even bigger. They created an atmosphere of danger. And what it, of course, led to was some kind from North Carolina driving up and shooting up this pizza place. Shooting up the pizza place where you had to then get a guard at the door, a bouncer at the door day and night at this family pizza place. It was heartbreaking. And so, when they fall in to their propaganda paranoia, what they're trying to do is equivalent to a Nazi book burning–how the Nazis would gather the Brown Shirts and burn books. And they'd stand around a bonfire and they'd get all frothy in the mouth and they'd get the taste of blood that they were coming after you, and they were going to change the culture. And they were in control now, they were in power now.
Well, these guys aren't getting around and doing book burnings, but what they're doing is they're firing up their base, they're firing up their brownshirts and getting them all excited. And that then puts public officials—like Hillary Clinton, like Obama and his family—in danger. Michelle Obama wrote about birtherism, how it wasn't a funny, silly little thing for her, how she felt in serious danger. Because what they're doing is that they are inspiring some of their followers to take that next step and show up with a gun in gun-obsessed America. And this is their blunt force instrument. There's nothing innocuous about this. They know what they're doing. They know that they are creating a culture of violence and they're fanning the flames of that violence.
Sarah Kendzior:
June 4th, 2020. (The Reichstag Fire)
Sarah Kendzior:
So this is familiar territory for me and this is real and this is very frightening to see these kind of tactics use here because I think that they're going to increasingly label anyone who opposes Trump as being in Antifa and anyone who opposes fascism as being in Antifa, because it is “antifascist”. So if you've been online like me and Andrea and other scholars of fascism and other opponents of fascism—which you should all be, because it's fascism!—then you are going to likely be targeted by this administration. I don't know in what form, but they're going to make this as answer as possible. And it's just incredibly dangerous on so many levels, first to have this scapegoat, but secondly, to just openly be declaring like, Yes, we oppose people who oppose fascism, we are fascists. Like, they are so blatant about this. They have been blatant the whole time. From the minute that Trump announced his platform, which had, you know, the classic hallmarks of fascism; of scapegoating minorities, wanting to use excessive military force, claiming that he himself is the government, you know, saying he wouldn't accept the election results. He did that back in 2016. He's going to do it again.
Andrea Chalupa:
July 23rd, 2020. (American Gestapo)
Sarah Kendzior:
We've emphasized over and over again that the situation we're in now, where we have Trump at the helm, came because there were not consequences for prior Republican crimes. Whether Watergate, Iran-Contra, the war in Iraq, the financial crisis, you see the same people again and again. They were never punished in the first place, and now we have a situation, as Andrea just mentioned, where those who were punished can be pardoned—or in Roger Stone's case, have their sentence commuted—and there is still no accountability. So one thing that really needs to happen is for Biden and others surrounding him to take a strong stance and say, We're not going to let this go this time. The country was hijacked. It was hijacked from within by complicit, traitorous Americans. It was hijacked from abroad by Russia, primarily, but with the support of other countries.
Sarah Kendzior:
And I was heartened to see that Biden did release a statement the other day about this and about the role of the Kremlin. I hope that there are actions behind his words if he does manage to get into office. But as Andrea noted, that itself is a long shot. We just had Trump tell Fox News straight out that he's probably not going to concede, even if Biden wins. He's like, "Oh, well, we'll see what happens." That's the same thing that he said in 2016. At that time, Roger Stone followed up and said, "Yeah, and we're planning a bloodbath. If Trump is not the president, you're going to see a bloodbath." Nothing has changed except for the fact that Trump has the full might of executive force behind him, and the question mark here remains the military and what they're going to do.
That's what Trump is testing in Portland and possible scenarios for the future include, perhaps, faceoffs between these unidentified, sort of paramilitary/unofficial state operatives that Trump has running around there and members of the military who are honoring their oath to the Constitution and to protecting the American people.
Andrea Chalupa:
July 23rd, 2020. (American Gestapo)
Andrea Chalupa:
About a year ago or so, Trump pardoned war criminals that were using civilians as target practice in Iraq and Afghanistan. He did this intentionally, turning these disgraced US military service members into martyrs, turning them into victims, as autocrats always like to play the victim. Autocrats and aspiring autocrats like Trump, they need sadists to be their shields. By inflicting terror, they protect the autocrat. By inflicting terror, they intimidate their political opponents. They avoid accountability. Trump is deliberately encouraging empowering this culture of terror in order to protect himself and stay in power. All of this fascist pageantry that we're seeing in Portland, Oregon, it's a continuation of that Bible stunt that they did in front of the White House, where Ivanka comes out in her stilettos and holding a big handbag that she carried the Bible in, and Barr was there.
Trump stands in front of the church and holds up the Bible, and they shot a bunch of protestors with tear gas in order to clear the area. Everyone was so shocked by that. They learned nothing from it, because that was all deliberate. When Trump said, weeks ago, "We've got to dominate the streets," he meant it. There was no remorse. They're doing this all intentionally to seize and stay in power. Everybody looking at all the polling that “Biden's ahead, Biden's ahead”, the conversation we need to be having is, What do we do when these autocrats create all these legal mechanisms—as Barr did with covering up the Mueller Report and burying the Mueller Report—what do we do when they try to create some legal mechanism and all this statewide terror to steal this 2020 election that they know they would lose if it was free and fair?
They have all these corrupt Republican officials on the ground who are tasked with helping them, because they have this whole culture of stealing elections. That's how they rely on seizing and staying in power. Look at the state of Georgia. I don't know what we'd do. I really don't know what we'd do other than taking to the streets in a big way, like Ukrainians have had to do to get rid of their Putin puppets.
Andrea Chalupa:
August 26th, 2020. (So Many Cults, So Little Time)
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm going to just sum up what's happening here. We have QAnon members running for Congress. We had a press conference in which Trump was asked this question that reminded me of like, when Lisa Simpson asked Mr. Burns questions when he was running for mayor on the Simpson, like, "You have the momentum of a runaway steam train, how do you do it?" But it was one of these, like "This group of people treats you as a Godlike figure and says that you're heroically rescuing children. Do you believe it?"
Of course, Trump is like, "Yes." And honestly, as much as I rightfully go off on Trump, I don't know how else one answers that question. It was just so obviously a planted question that could have been asked in a different way. Anyway, there's been a lot of discussion about, Is QAnon dangerous? The answer is, Yes, to an extent, because any cult is dangerous, and that's what this has become.
Blind obedience is inherently dangerous. And because some members of QAnon have a history of violence, Trump is going to use QAnon to stoke violence, particularly around the time of the election and after the election. And so people are saying, "What do we do?" And I have been saying for three years, the only way to neuter QAnon, to strip it of whatever violent capacity it might have, is for everyone— including and especially our officials—to be brutally honest about corruption in government.
Sarah Kendzior:
September 9th, 2020. (The Good Germans)
Sarah Kendzior:
In the Atlantic article, Goldberg describes Kelly and Trump standing at the grave of Kelly's son, Robert, killed at age 29 in Afghanistan when he stepped on a landmine while leading a platoon of Marines. Trump, while standing by Robert Kelly's grave, turned directly to his father and said, "I don't get it. What was in it for them?" Goldberg writes. Trump went on to call those who serve in the military “losers and suckers”. The silence of these military Good Germans, even when Trump is belittling their dead family members to their faces is deeply unnerving in its own right, but also because the military may play a key role in the chaotic months ahead, particularly after the November election in which Trump will refuse to concede and will encourage civic violence, which he is already doing.
Andrea Chalupa:
October 14th, 2020. (Stay and Fight)
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, so much of this is just a replay of 2016. It's like we got trapped in 2016 and are just reliving it over and over. It is like Something Wicked This Way Comes. We're on the carousel that goes backwards, led by the Darkman and his evil carnival. But all of this, the attack—or the plotted attack—on Governor Whitmer that was broken up by the FBI, I remember at the time in October of 2016, which granted, just like now, was a crazy news month, this story broke that a group of white supremacist domestic terrorists were plotting—inspired by Trump and on behalf of Trump—to bomb an apartment complex that housed a number of Somali refugees in Kansas.
The FBI broke this up shortly before the election, arrested those individuals, and I remember at the time, it was unclear what the election would be. I thought it would be either very close, which it was. It was like Bush versus Gore. I thought Trump would probably win, wasn't completely sure. These guys thought he was going to lose and they were ready to honor their martyred victim. And Trump, just like now, was calling for violence.
You had Roger Stone back in 2016 calling for a bloodbath, saying there's going to be a bloodbath if Trump loses the election. And so, so much of this is just the same thing again, and again, whether it's Trump calling for his "Second Amendment people” back in 2016, to take out Hillary Clinton or Trump calling and encouraging mass violence now, as well as continuing to target Hillary Clinton despite her not running for office. And CNBC, Joe Biden was asked by them if he believes that Trump's “Liberate Michigan” tweet (which he tweeted in April during the coronavirus beginnings when people were refusing to wear a mask), whether that tweet encouraged militias. Biden said, "Yes, I do. Why won't the president just say stop? Stop, stop, stop, and we will pursue you if you don't?"
So Biden recognizes this and I'm glad he seems to be taking a hard line against it. I don't know what other line you could possibly take unless you are pro-domestic terrorism. But, you know...Trump is. The other difference now, of course, is that Trump has been purging and gutting the FBI. They've been relabeling what the categories of terrorism are. That was an early move when he had Jeff Sessions as his Attorney General, was to stop looking at white nationalists and militia domestic terrorists and focus solely on Islamic terrorists.
We also have Trump at war with the FBI, to a degree. He already purged it of many of the people who were investigating transnational organized crime, investigating the Russian mafia. He also doesn't want them to be cracking down on these violent militants who will act on his behalf, who will answer his call, for example, after the election, if he sees violence as a means to securing an illegal win, which I think he does. It's a two pronged tactic: One tactic is to have it play out in court–which is, as we just said, why he's been packing the Supreme Court–and to have a replay of Bush versus Gore with three people on the Court that were involved in Bush versus Gore ruling on Trump's behalf. The other, I think, is to have so much violence and chaos and misery in the streets of America that people will become frustrated and they will just throw their hands up in the air and be like, "You know what, put a stop to it, just put a stop to it, because all of this on top of the pandemic is more than I can take."
Sarah Kendzior:
November 18th, 2020. (Actual Nazis)
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, absolutely. And unfortunately, I expect to see more of this as we move toward inauguration. You know, these are Trump's shock troops. I think the pandemic complicates how they operate, but they also are effective in that capacity of making sure that this virus spreads, making sure that if people get out in the street to try to do a counter protest, that they put themselves at risk. So, you know, people, think strategically, think tactically about how you want to stop this, and never ever accept this as normal. These group groups have been steadily rising in terms of their numbers, in terms of their hate crimes, since before Trump. Their rise began during the Obama era and it was not taken as seriously as it should have, even though we had clear signs of where this was going. We had Roger Stone calling for a bloodbath in 2016.
Sarah Kendzior:
We had Trump encouraging these during his election then and throughout his entire tenure as president. So this is, in many ways, where we inevitably end up and it can get worse. So be careful.
Andrea Chalupa:
December 9th, 2020. (Donald Trump is a Ponzi Scheme)
Sarah Kendzior:
Some officials have managed to constrain him and to honor the will of the voters. Trump has lost nearly all 50 court battles that he's pursued, and bureaucrats like Emily Murphy ultimately stopped blocking Biden's transition. But you should take this moment in history very seriously, not only for what may happen, but for what has already happened. The United States will never again be able to say that it is a country that always practices the peaceful transfer of power. It will never again be able to say that its candidates concede when they are defeated and that they do not resort to tactics of violence and intimidation to harness an illegitimate takeover. Americans will never be able to look at attempted coups in other countries and say, “That can't happen here.”
Americans should have never said that in the first place. So what does lay ahead? We don't know. Gaslit Nation is known for predicting the future, but the reason we are able to do that is because Trump follows a standard autocratic playbook. He also announces his moves in advance. He announced he would not accept the results of the 2020 election for months before the election took place—that is, accept them if he lost—and he said in 2016 that he would not accept a loss in that election either. That is how he operates.
In my book, Hiding in Plain Sight, I described Trump's earliest presidential run in 1988 and how he refused to stay in the race for president unless he believed his win was preordained. Trump has always been the same person, and one of the biggest mysteries remains why officials did not speak out against this obvious national security threat when they had the chance.
An aspiring autocrat’s tactics are easy to predict, particularly one who has been in the public eye for 40 years. What is far more difficult to predict is how ordinary people react to the aspiring autocrat. So far, we've seen a wide range of reactions; the horrifying acquiescence of the GOP, who have largely refused to acknowledge Biden's win, and who have in some cases encouraged violence in Trump's name. The Republican Party of Arizona, for example, was doing that this morning, on Tuesday morning. Their rabid obedience should frighten you.
We've also seen a lot of strange activity involving the military, from firings at the DoD and strange activity in the Middle East (which we covered on past recent episodes of Gaslit Nation) to new forms of sabotage at the Pentagon. Last week, Trump refused to allow members of Biden's transition team to meet with officials at Pentagon-controlled US intelligence agencies. The Washington Post has described the sabotage, which seems both an indicator that Trump has no intention of handing over power and may attempt to use the military to hold on to that power, as “a national security threat”.
Even assuming that Biden takes over in January, the Trump blockade leaves the Biden team unprepared to handle threats from hostile states, which are of course watching this play out with great interest. But the news isn't entirely grim. We've seen a number of officials fighting back in courts where judges have rejected Trump's baseless claims. We've seen bureaucrats in states like Georgia and Michigan fighting back, even though Trump's goon squad is trying to threaten them into submission.
It is good to see people doing their job, but that job should not come at the cost of threats to their lives, and that sacrifice should never be minimized. The threat will grow more intense as Trump's court losses continue to mount and his violent lackeys, like Michael Flynn, spread conspiracy theories and encourage vengeance, an occult of victimhood.
Sarah Kendzior:
December 16th, 2020. (Barr and Other Hacks)
Andrea Chalupa:
Trump is going to be more dangerous than ever, and we're going to have to take every day as it comes. Yes, it's going to get worse before it gets better. Yes, Trumpism is here to stay, as we saw this past weekend with the violent hate crime march by the Nazi base of Trumpism—the Proud Boys—in Washington, D.C. where they attacked a historically Black church. The 126 Republicans that signed on to this farce of challenging the legitimacy of Biden's very clear win, understand that, yes, they're doing that as a gesture. There's no real teeth behind it. There haven't been any real teeth behind any of these klown kar efforts to overturn the election. But the real danger of what they're doing is disinformation. They're spreading harmful disinformation and continuing to convince tens of millions of Trump's voters that they're victimized, that they're oppressed, and therefore justified in using any means possible to attack and undermine what they're perceiving as a "tyrannical system", AKA, democracy.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. The coup has moved into its violent stage and this is what we had predicted before. We had the first stage of the coup, which was Trump attempting to rig the election through things like trying to destroy the Postal Service, trying to delay the mail, making up narratives of election fraud. That has failed. They then went to the courts over 50 times and that failed, most notably last week in the Supreme Court. Now, we are in the next stage, which is violence, as you said, by white supremacist groups acting on behalf of Trump and backed by the sedition caucus (which you just named) of these 150+ overtly treasonous Republicans. This is the revival of the Confederacy and they should be treated like Confederates. They should be marked as traitors and made to face serious consequences.It's sedition. It cannot be laughed off or treated as just a grift, or dismissed as inconsequential simply because the court cases failed. This is the building blocks of a new narrative—a narrative of violence—and it needs to be dismantled before it can grow. So yes, as you said, we had a violent weekend. We had the beginning of what may be many weeks of these acts of violence.
A lot of times when people say Civil War II is coming, they're envisioning something much more clear cut: Union versus the Confederacy. This is why you see these absolutely idiotic and insulting and dangerous narratives of secession or, “let the South secede”, or whatever a bunch of rich white people from the Northeast and California seem to be saying, which is just a fundamentally racist narrative, because if you look at who lives in the South and is suffering under these GOP policies, it's primarily Black people, and they seem fine to let that happen.
Anyway, sorry, I got on a tangent there. What we're seeing are people who expect a civil war fought like the 19th century are deeply misled. What we're likely to see (and this will continue throughout the Biden administration, just as it was there throughout the Obama administration) are selective incidences of violence increasing; bombings, mass shootings, and things like the desecration of Black churches, white supremacists burning Black Lives Matter banners in the streets and marching, stabbings, things like that, and we're going to continue to see people like Michael Flynn, Alex Jones, these are grifters but they're also extremely dangerous propagandists who have the ability to incite violence, and they were there last weekend trying to rev people up.
Andrea Chalupa:
January 5th, 2021. (Traitors and Patriots)
Sarah Kendzior:
So, again, make sure you tune in tonight. We're going to give our instant reaction to this critical Georgia Senate race, which will, of course, be followed by the massive shitshow of January 6th, which we're also going to do a special episode on. So, this is a momentous week.
Sarah Kendzior:
To just kind of set the stage, I think Andrea encapsulated very well the level of trauma that we as Americans are going through—that the world is going through—as a result of COVID, as a result of rising autocracy, collapsed economies, but to just kind of lay out exactly how bad this is compared to previous times: We are now living through the worst pandemic in modern history—certainly, the worst pandemic in the last century—the worst economy since the great depression, and it will probably be worse than that (the only reason I'm saying it's not is because it hasn't gone on as long), the worst hack of the US government in history, and that's the hack by Russia, which we really haven't heard a lot about since it first occurred, but it affected, basically, every governmental institution as well as a large number of private companies. That hack, that attack—the cyber attack on America—is ongoing.
We are living through an attempted coup. This is the first time that the President of the United States, after being soundly defeated, has refused to accept the election results and is using all sorts of tactics, including threats of violence, to try to maintain his position. We're going to be talking about that all episode long.
We have a brewing civil war as a result of the factions that have been inflamed by this treason and by these crimes. We have a brewing foreign war with Iran, which we're also going to talk through. We have an administration that serves organized crime, and that has been the case from the moment that Trump has stepped into office. And yes, it builds on the relationships of prior administrations, but this is still unprecedented in how blatant and how direct it is, and how irrelevant they find the survival of the United States, which is an afterthought at best and its destruction is a goal, a specific goal at worst. Of course, all of this is being led by a narcissistic sociopath who sees other human beings as disposable and has a lifelong obsession with using nukes. So, that's where we are.
Sarah Kendzior:
January 5th, 2021. (Traitors and Patriots)
Andrea Chalupa:
If you need a shot at courage, watch this documentary. I'm going to read now from a letter that U.S. Grant sent his father on April 21st, 1861, when the Civil War just broke out. It very much sums up what we're up against.
"Dear Father, we are now in the midst of trying times when everyone must be for or against his country and show his colors, too, by his every act. Having been educated for such an emergency, at the expense of the Government, I feel that it has upon me superior claims, such claims as no ordinary motives of self-interest can surmount.
“I do not wish to act hastily or unadvisedly in the matter, and as there are more than enough to respond to the first call of the President, I have not yet offered myself. I have promised, and am giving all the assistance I can in organizing the company whose services have been accepted from this place. I have promised further to go with them to the State Capitol, and if I can be of service to the Governor in organizing his state troops to do so.
“What I ask now is your approval of the course I am taking or advice in the matter. A letter written this week will reach me in Springfield. I have not time to write to you but a hasty line, for, though Sunday as it is, we are all busy here. In a few minutes, I shall be engaged in directing tailors in the style and trim of uniform for our men.
“Whatever may have been my political opinions before, I have but one sentiment now. That is, we have a Government, and laws, and a flag, and they must all be sustained. There are but two parties now: traitors and patriots, and I want hereafter to be ranked with the latter, and I trust, the stronger party. I do not know, but you may be placed in an awkward position, and a dangerous one. But costs cannot now be counted. My advice would be to leave where you are if you are not safe with the views you entertain. I would never stultify my opinion for the sake of a little security.”
Andrea Chalupa:
January 13th, 2021. (Clear Intent)
Sarah Kendzior:
Look where we are now: We had a siege on the motherfucking Capitol.
[Outro theme music, roll credits]
Andrea Chalupa:
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Sarah Kendzior:
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Andrea Chalupa:
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Sarah Kendzior:
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Andrea Chalupa:
Original music in Gaslit Nation is produced by David Whitehead, Martin Vissenberg, Nik Farr, Demien Arriaga and Karlyn Daigle
Sarah Kendzior:
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Andrea Chalupa:
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