Biden and power by force

The Usual hype

For “The West Australian”, for his last days, Donald Trump, like Adolf Hitler, wishes for “the twilight of the gods”.

In every presidential election in the United States, we are told that the incumbent was a monster, that we are sorry for the crimes he committed, but that a new day is dawning for humanity with the rise of a new leader. The only exception is the election of Donald Trump in 2016. At that time and even before he was sworn in, we were told that this billionaire was elected following a regrettable mistake, that he was misogynistic, homophobic, racist, that he did not embody the “country of freedom”, but the supremacism of the “little whites” and the interests of the rich. For four years, we were constantly being convinced that this diagnosis was right. He was called a liar and his ideas and achievements were ignored.

This time, the insurrection on Capitol Hill allowed the dominant news agencies to add a layer to it. The outgoing president, Donald Trump, is unanimously accused of destroying democracy, which the incoming president, Joe Biden, will of course restore. Are those who remember the elections of George H. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama ready to be fooled again?

For “Milliyet” (Turkey), the virtuous America has gone mad.

Yes, because the shock caused by the capture of the Capitol is such that one is willing to believe anything. If the United States is inexorably heading towards civil war [1], what will become of us Westerners?

This is why we did not want to see the crisis that is beginning to unfold. Only a few Greek newspapers had recently explained the reasons for the anger, which we have been dealing with for five years already (i.e. before Trump’s election).

This is also why we don’t want to look it in the face and we are satisfied with the blind comments that this shameful episode will not have a tomorrow. But who can believe it? It is true that things will calm down for a while and the repressive machine will crush the January 6 demonstrators, but it will only be a postponement and the civil war will not be long in coming.

Non-Westerners have already understood that the United States has such internal problems that it will no longer be able to set itself up as a model for the world, let alone give lessons in democracy to those it wants to subjugate.

Undemocratic elections

According to “La Razon” (Spain), the insurgency in the United States was the Trumpeters taking Capitol Hill.

In the 2000 presidential election, the bewildered world watched as the Supreme Court chose to ignore the recount of the Florida ballots. In accordance with the Constitution, it declared that it had no business interfering with a state’s ballot and was constrained only by Governor Jeb Bush’s decision that his brother George W. Bush had been elected by his constituents. Twenty years later, the world is watching the dismissal of 60 appeals filed by Donald Trump alleging massive fraud in many states.

As I wrote earlier, from a US legal perspective, Al Gore and then Donald Trump lost. But from a democratic point of view, they probably won. To tell the truth, it is impossible to know exactly, but given the results of the other elections that were held at the same time, there is little doubt about that. The only thing that can be said is that there is nothing democratic about this election: the counting of the votes is done by the governors, who in many federal states choose the civil servants or private companies that will do the counting. On the contrary, if the system were democratic, the counting would be done by citizens in public. Everyone could see ballot boxes being taken from the polling stations to a counting centre where officials opened them and then closed the curtains to prevent citizens from finding out more. No one can question the sincerity of these officials, but no one can guarantee it either. A democratic election can only exist in transparency. Therefore, this election is legal under US law, but simply not democratic.

Turnarounds

According to the “Corriere della Sera” (Italy), Trump’s fury is the assault on the Capitol.

To understand the events, we must observe two reversals of the situation that preceded the attack on the Capitol.

In mid-December 2020, President Trump organised a meeting at the Oval Office with the participation of General Michael Flynn. Flynn outlined his idea of martial law for transparent elections [2]. Most of the councillors present were opposed, despite the change of leadership in the Pentagon. Two weeks later, on 4 January 2021, the 10 former defence secretaries still alive signed a brief op-ed in the Washington Post [3]. They assured that all those who tried to introduce martial law would have to answer to the Justice Department. The unanimity of the former Secretaries of Defense attests that martial law was feasible and real. According to the Post [4], which reconstructed the meeting on the basis of the confidences of the former defence secretaries (who did not attend but were informed), President Trump never contemplated staying in power through the use of violence. On the contrary, he filed complaints and supported various legal actions to have the election annulled. He was preparing to campaign to return to the White House in 2025 [5].

For the Hindustan Times (India), the states of the Americas are no longer united, but on fire.

Vice-President Mike Pence, who was under heavy pressure from the Jacksonians, made his position known on January 6, the day the two congressional assemblies met in joint session [6]. He noted that his role as presiding officer was purely ceremonial and that it was not his job to decide the dispute, even though a certain reading of the Constitution theoretically gives him the right to do so. He therefore deferred to the parliamentarians. To do otherwise would have opened the smouldering civil war. At times like these, everyone knows what he or she can lose, and few people, particularly among the notables, are willing to take such a risk. As soon as this position became known, several important members of the Trump team resigned. The Jacksonians experienced these reversals as cowardice and betrayal of their ideals and their homeland.

A few hours later, Donald Trump held a meeting, not far from Congress, to denounce once again a “stolen election” and announce his return for the 2024 campaign. He never called on his supporters to take Capitol Hill, although some may have understood it that way.

Taking the Capitol

According to “Dawn” (Greece), “Trumpism is here and it threatens us”.

Some groups that were marginalized during the meeting tried to enter the Capitol. According to the videos, the Capitol police let them in without any real resistance. The demonstrators initially behaved deferentially in this place, which is sacred to them. However, they had been infiltrated by a group of Antifas. Without knowing why or how, things suddenly got out of hand. The hemicycle was invaded and parliamentarians’ offices were ransacked.

Anyone who has lived through a civil war knows that this is the worst thing that can happen. Like the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who lived through the first English civil war, they all believe that it is better to suffer a tyrannical state than to be deprived of a state (The Leviathan [7]). Taking the Capitol and eventually overthrowing the US “order” is an act with terrible consequences. It has not gone that far. The police who had allowed the demonstrators to enter the building suddenly and successfully pushed them back.

President Donald Trump himself called for calm, but without his wife. According to the US national religion, God’s blessing – and thus peace and prosperity – must descend through the president and first lady [8] on the “chosen people”. By choosing to speak on his own, Donald Trump has challenged the national religion.

Reactions in the US

According to the “Daily Mirror” (UK), now in the United States, it is now government by the mob.

Democratic congressmen, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, immediately accused President Trump of having launched his troops on an assault on Congress. They proposed to impeach President Trump, even though he had only 13 days left in his term, through the 25th Amendment, paragraph 4 of the Constitution. This move, which they had previously discussed, would remove his right to stand for re-election.

However, the text invoked should not apply in this case: it concerns a disability attributable to the health of the President. The debates at the time of its adoption concerned the heart attack which prevented President Woodrow Wilson from fulfilling his duties at the end of his term of office (2 October 1919 to 4 March 1921) and the stroke – less serious – of President Dwight Eisenhower (24 September 1955 to 20 January 1961) which temporarily deprived him of some of his faculties and led him to share his powers with his vice-president Richard Nixon.

The ruling class felt the wind of the cannonball blowing. Whether the capture of Capitol Hill was a failure of its police force, as they try to persuade us, or whether it was organized under a false flag by Donald Trump’s enemies, those who conceived it have the capacity to overthrow institutions and sack their entire staff.

Reactions abroad

For the “Boston Herald” (USA), this is chaos.

After a century of US domination, the rest of the world still doesn’t know what they are. It doesn’t know that the Constitution was written to establish a regime inspired by the British monarchy and that it was rebalanced by 10 amendments that guarantee people’s rights. The country that Alexis de Tocqueville describes in Democracy in America [9] is the country of this compromise, a country of freedom, but this balance was upset during the Obama years. Blinded, the rest of the world did not see that the United States has reverted to what it was in the first four years of its foundation: an oligarchic system, this time in the service of a class of international billionaires. It deliberately ignored the plight of the former middle classes, the grouping of the population by cultural affinity and the preparation of two-thirds of the population for civil war.

The Chinese media cannot help but notice the double standard when comparing photos of the Hong Kong assembly being taken by a high-voltage crowd with those from Washington. While the Russian media, busy with the Orthodox Christmas party, smiled disillusioned at their historic rival on land.

For their part, the Western media have embraced without reservation the neo-Puritan “cancel culture” that destroys all republican symbols and replaces them with others glorifying minorities, not for what they do, but because they are minorities. In doing so, they have identified a little more with the ideology that oppresses “America” [10]. As submissive vassals, they presented the US election as if their readers were going to participate and Joe Biden as their new master.

The “Chicago Tribune” (USA) does not denounce sedition, but sees insurrection.

Reacting to the events on Capitol Hill, European leaders are taking their dreams for granted: German President and former head of the secret service, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said that armed pro-Trump protesters had taken Capitol Hill; while the French President and former secretary to a well-known philosopher, Emmanuel Macron, denounced an attack on the fundamental principle of democracy “One man, one vote”.

No. With few exceptions, the Capitol demonstrators were unarmed.
No. The U.S. Constitution does not provide for equality among citizens of any state.
Yes. It is the US ruling class that despises democracy and the Jacksonians who defend it.

“God help us! “proclaims the Philadephia Daily News (USA). “The non-civil war has come to this point: rioters have taken the Capitol”.

Already the very great fortunes that stand behind Joe Biden have seized power. They have put an end to freedom of expression. They “preventively” closed the Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitch accounts of the White House, President Trump and his supporters in order to “prevent them from calling for further violence” (sic). In doing so, they have arrogated to themselves the powers of Justice and have escaped the Trump decree of 28 June 2020 enjoining them to choose between the status of neutral carrier of information or that of committed producer of information [11].