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“American Carnage” Prediction?

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Defending Democracy FLVCS News & Articles Mel's Analyses
October 19, 2020

by Melvin A. Goodman, Mel Goodman author of "American Carnage" Prediction

As we get closer to the presidential election, and Donald Trump increasingly fears he is holding a losing hand, the bizarre description of “American Carnage” in Trump’s inauguration speech in 2017 becomes more ominously an uncanny prediction for 2020. In the 2016 presidential debates, former Florida governor Jeb Bush remarked that “Donald Trump is a chaos candidate, and he would be a chaos president.” Well, here we are.

Election Carnage

In the past several weeks, there has been a burst of bureaucratic chaos as Trump does his utmost to hold on to his base rather than to try to expand his appeal throughout the country. Trump clearly intends to contest mail-in ballots, and he expects to get a great deal of assistance from the huge number of judges his administration has appointed to appeals courts.

  • A federal judge recently struck down a decree from Texas Governor Greg Abbott to limit each county in Texas to a single drop box for absentee ballots. Several days later, an appellate panel of three Trump-appointed judges froze the lower court order and sanctioned Abbott’s order. As a result, Harris County, home to more than two million voters, and Wheeler County, with fewer than 4,000 voters, would each have one drop box for the hand-delivery of absentee ballots.
  • In one presidential term, Trump has managed to shift the ideological balance of appeals courts that cover states that could decide the election. This is true for the Third Circuit that covers Pennsylvania; the 11th Circuit that covers Florida and Georgia; and the Ninth Circuit that covers Arizona and Nevada.
  • In the run-up to next month’s election, there are already more than 300 cases in state and federal courts that deal with election-related litigation. Last week, an appeals court in Michigan, for example, imposed a deadline on returning mail-in ballots, which was sought by Republican legislators.

    • Census Carnage

    The courts, including the Supreme Court are also involved in a Trump initiative to stop the census count, which would have an impact on calculating congressional seats for the next ten years as well as on the allocation of federal funding.

  • Last week, the Supreme Court agreed with the Trump administration to stop the census count even though the pandemic has made it more difficult to reach distant communities, as well as, people of color.
  • We recently learned that then-deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein told a group of U.S. attorneys on the border with Mexico not to contest the policy of family separation even in cases involving children who were barely more than infants.

    • Carnage Avoided

    Nevertheless, Donald Trump complained publicly that his attorney general, William Barr, wasn’t doing enough to investigate the efforts of the Obama administration to deny Trump his presidential victory in 2016. Trump blared that Hillary Clinton should be jailed, and that Joe Biden was a criminal who should be barred from running for the presidency. There is no precedent for a president in the heat of a reelection campaign to orchestrate an investigation by the Department of Justice of his opposition.

  • In this case, at least, Barr has emphasized that Obama and Biden are not under investigation. Barr also countered Trump by stating that the department’s criminal investigation of the FBI and the CIA will not be issuing its report until after the November election.
  • In the case of the sentencing of Roger Stone, however, Attorney General Barr quickly sought a lesser penalty.

    • POSTSCRIPT: Rare Good News:

    There is resistance within the Department of Justice against the enabling tactics of Attorney General Barr, but the mainstream media is not highlighting these examples. Last week, a veteran DoJ prosecutor accused Barr of abusing his powers to sway the election for Trump, and resigned from the department. He was the third senior prosecutor to issue a public rebuke of the attorney general. It is extremely unusual for DoJ lawyers to go public in discussing internal politics of the department.

    The other piece of good news is from the Constitution itself, which gives the States responsibility for choosing the “Time, Places and Manner of holding Elections.” If the Trump and his enabler-in-chief, Bill Barr, try to interfere with the vote count in the November election, the Courts should uphold State laws on the process.

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    1 Comment

    • by Steve Martin
      Posted December 17, 2020 11:59 AM

      In Barr’s recent announcement that with a little over a month left in his role as AG that he is exiting to “spend more time with family”, I believe that we see the proverbial final straw.

      The question is what was it? Given Barr’s willingness to “dry run” Pinochet style actions on civil disturbance in Portland, OR and in Lafayette square it is clear to this writer that Trump was demanding support of his using the 1977 Emergency Act and PEADs (Presidential Executive Actions Documents) that would allow Trump to engage in suspending habeas corpus, seizing control of the internet, imposing censorship, and incarcerating so-called subversives. Again we saw Trumps attempts to test run these kinds of initiatives. It was hair raising to see how little objection there was by Democrats or the mainstream press in these extraordinary actions.

      We must not be lulled into a false sense ease over the end of national nightmare. It’s just going into another phase

      Reply

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