In the Elections of 2016 and 2020 a majority of American voters rejected the candidacy of Donald Trump, although he eked out a few thousand votes in enough swing states to win the Electoral College vote in the first one. If he does it again in the Election of 2024, that will effectively end our 248-year experiment in democracy. For over a year now, I’ve been tracing the Republican Party’s descent since WWII into an anti-democracy and anti-constitution personality cult that promises a new plutocratic-theocratic authoritarian form of government requiring loyalty to one man.
The influence of Dick Cheney and his horde of neo-conservatives was instrumental in promoting the Bush-Cheney administration’s concept of the unitary chief executive unrestrained by checks and balances. However, the success of George W. Bush’s getting elected governor of Texas and president of the U.S. was largely the work of Karl Rove, whom Bush dubbed “The Architect.” He knew how to use religion to subvert the separation of church and state to the advantage of the Republican Party and his particular client.
Whereas Kevin Phillips emphasized the “who hates who” approach to get white supremacists to vote for Ronald Reagan, Rove advocated using the “what are voters angry about” method to turn out the right-wing evangelicals for Bush. Evangelicals were angry about abortion and same-sex marriage. Getting those issues banned through amendments to the U.S. Constitution was highly unlikely, but there were other ways to get evangelicals out to vote.
Republican-controlled state legislatures could pass laws that would ban abortion if Roe v. Wade was ever overturned and give evangelicals credit for making it possible while most voters would never know what they had done until later. Also, Republican legislatures could place proposals to amend their state constitutions on their states’ ballots to ban same-sex marriage. Each of these methods should turn out the evangelical vote for Bush-Cheney in 2004. It worked. Since then, Donald Trump’s appointments to the Supreme Court have gotten rid of Roe v. Wade, and now the Trumpistas are targeting transgender youths. And their con-artist strongman is even selling Bibles now.
Rove had an ally in Dick Cheney, except that Cheney – with a gay daughter – objected to his anti-gay rights agenda. Whereas Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Reagan appealed to the dark sides of their prospective voters’ emotions, it was Vice-President Cheney who admitted it. After 9/11 woke up the administration to the threat of terrorism, he said that to defeat Osama bin Laden, the United States would have to turn to its dark side. Rove and Cheney both knew we had a historic dark side: genocide of the Native Americans, slavery, Jim Crow, opposition to women’s rights/gay rights/worker’s rights, et al.
As a result, the nice-sounding bipartisan PATRIOT Act was passed, resulting in the government being able to spy on innocent Americans. Also, dark sites were created in compliant nations where we could send captives to be “interrogated” and tortured – one of the CIA’s secret prisons in Lithuania was recently in the news. And don’t forget the embarrassments of the Abu Ghraib prison and of our Guantanamo prison camp in Cuba. There are still inmates at Guantanamo who cannot be brought to trial because of their having been tortured. The Bush-Cheney administration had no Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to remind them – as he did during the Cuban Missile Crisis – “We have to remember who we are.”
As the unnecessary and incompetently run Iraq War dragged on, the Democrats regained control of Congress in the Elections of 2006. The big question was this: Would Congress finally impeach President Bush for the 950 lies he used to get us to invade Iraq and for his authorization of the use of torture to implement his War on Terror, which included his wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Whereas Republicans will jump on any opportunity to use its impeachment power against Democrats, Democrats have historically been reluctant to do so against Republicans. For one thing, the Republican’s zeal to trivialize the impeachment provision so as to impeach Bill Clinton had made impeachment seem less important. It was just a game to play to have fun.
Also, since the Clinton impeachment was a strictly partisan, knee-jerk reaction to the Democrats’ serious, bipartisan investigations into Nixon’s Watergate shenanigans and to Reagan’s Iran-Contra activities, the Democrats did not want to be seen as petty as the Republicans. On the other hand, as serious as the actions of the Bush-Cheney administration were, the administration had bipartisan support after 9/11, so the Democrats were partially responsible for allowing their unconstitutional transgressions. They knew what kind of people Cheney and his neo-cons were, but they went along under the spirit of patriotism.
Under Donald Trump, the Republican Congress pretended to be deaf, dumb, blind, and stupid to all his transgressions for two years: his violations of the emoluments clause, his interference with the FBI, et al. As long as he appointed extreme reactionary Federalist Society judges to the federal courts, attempted to end Obamacare, and cut taxes on the well-to-do, he could do anything he wanted that benefited him personally.
During Trump’s second two years, the Democratic Congress tried to hold him accountable for two impeachable offenses: Trying to extort military aid to the President of Ukraine in return for helping him in the 2020 election and inciting an insurrection to overthrow the government of the United States. Only the 2012 Republican nominee for president, Sen. Mitt Romney, voted guilty both times – and he’s retiring this year. Those few in the House who voted to impeach on the second egregious offense have been defeated for re-election, like Liz Cheney, or have retired or are retiring, like Adam Kinzinger. Soon, Republican defenders of the Constitution, like those who existed during the Watergate Era, will no longer exist.
High Noon 
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