(Dobbs) "Shock Troops" To Win Control of America?
Call it an insurrection, call it a coup, but it isn't over.
“You have to have shock troops. We’re gonna have 20,000 ready to go. We control this country. We have to start acting like it.”
You might think such fighting words came from a colonial rebel in 1776, when we were ruled by an autocrat more than 3,000 miles from our shores. When we suffered taxation without representation. When “Don’t tread on me” meant the colonies yearned for a constitutional government.
But those fighting words weren’t uttered in 1776 by an American revolutionary. They were uttered in 2021— just last week to be specific— by an American renegade by the name of Stephen Bannon, the one-time head of Donald Trump’s first campaign for president and then his chief strategist and senior counselor in the White House.
As the fabled Aesop said long ago, “A man is known by the company he keeps.”
So do not take those fighting words lightly. In the drive to destroy democracy, where Bannon goes, Trump is not far behind.
Of course Trump’s protege always has an explanation for his brazen bombast. He sickly alluded last year on his aptly named War Room podcast to beheading two of Trump’s nemeses, Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray: ”I’d put the heads on pikes, right, I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the program or you’re gone. Time to stop playing games.” His explanation afterward? It was “metaphorical.”
And last week’s War Room statement about shock troops? Just “fire and brimstone” he says, a road map to take back the country and govern. But it’s more like fanning a fire under his followers’ feet, because Bannon went on to foretell, and perhaps to impel those shock troops, “the return of Trump, and it ain’t going to be in 2024, it’s gonna be in 2022, or maybe before.”
If that doesn’t make you fear for our future, little will, because as we learned with the invasion of the Capitol on January 6th, words have consequences. Remember the rally in the shadow of the Washington Monument that menacing morning where Rudy Giuliani exhorted Trump’s followers to “trial by combat?” Remember Donald Jr. warning wayward Republicans, “We’re coming for you?” Remember the battle cry from the defeated president himself? "We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.”
The consequences of those words were rebellion. And it didn’t end on January 6th.
To the contrary, it has mushroomed. Now we are living not just with a relentless rebellion against the elected government of our country, but with an anti-democratic rebellion against the stability and fairness of our nation’s future elections. We’re also now living with an anti-scientific rebellion against our health and welfare. This past weekend I saw a video montage of citizens outside a school in California chasing and deriding mask-wearing parents, of other citizens physically harassing school board members who had mandated masks and vaccines for students, and of others vandalizing and overturning a Covid testing tent in New York.
Their selfish stupidity is inexplicable but they epitomize Bannon’s declaration: “We control this country. We have to start acting like it.” And you know where they find their encouragement? From the likes of Stephen Bannon, and Donald Trump, and all the elected leaders in America who— despite their early denunciations of what happened on January 6th— now are part of their party’s push to delete that disgraceful day from the nation’s memory.
Like the defeated vice president, Mike Pence. “One day in January” is how he characterized it last week on Fox News. “They want to use that one day,” Pence proclaimed, “to try and demean the character and intentions of 74 million Americans” who voted for him and Trump. (Note to Pence: 81 million didn’t.)
So it was just “one day,” and no big deal. Like November 7, 1917 was just “one day” in Russia, when the Bolshevik revolution ushered in an interminable era of Communism. Or like August 19, 1934 was just “one day” in Germany, when Adolf Hitler was declared the Fuhrer and his evil agenda became law. Or like September 11, 2001 was just “one day” in America, when terrorists turned our world upside down and pushed us into two costly wars.
Just “one day” this year— January 6th— was an attempt by Trump and his shock troops to overturn the election and undermine the Constitution. Or as the troops themselves preposterously put it, to “stop the steal.” The scary thing is, as Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein said this week, “Almost half of the adult voters in this country, from all of the polls and what we saw in the last election, are willing to go along with these lies. So we are in a kind of civil war in this country.”
A civil war led by Donald Trump who incredibly, for all intents and purposes, has been enabled and endorsed by one of the two major political parties in the United States of America. Those who complain are cast out.
Bernstein compared Trump to Richard Nixon, and as a reporter who held Nixon to account in the sorry scandal of Watergate, he knows of what he speaks. Nixon was imperial, and so was Trump, but here’s the difference: on August 7th, 1974, the leadership of Nixon’s own Republican party went to the White House and told the president he had to go. Two days later, he did. “He didn’t start a coup at the last minute to say, I’m gonna stay here, I’m not leaving,” Bernstein recalls. “He said, I have to go. He acknowledged that he had to go.”
Call it surrender, call it contrition, call it a slap in the face, call it a concession to reality.
That hasn’t happened with Trump’s Republican Party. And it hasn’t happened with Trump. From all we’ve seen— especially with talk about “shock troops”— it probably never will.
People describe January 6th, and the behavior of those who incited and engineered it, in different ways. “An insurrection,” “a coup,” “seditious,” “traitorous,” “treasonous.” But in a way, it doesn’t really matter what words we use. It was unpatriotic. It was un-American.
And it isn’t over.
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For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
If you had told me when you were recording your audiobook here this would be our political situation in 2021, I think I would have laughed at your imagination. Now I just shake my head in dismay over our current political situation. What's to be done?