Bill Berkowitz and Gale Bataille for BuzzFlash: Trump’s Waltzing With White Nationalists Encourages Pre-and-Post Election Violence
September 17, 2020
Flag supporting Donald Trump at a rally at Veterans Memorial Coliseum at the Arizona State Fairgrounds in Phoenix, Arizona (Gage Skidmore)
By Bill Berkowitz and Gale Bataille
By claiming absentee ballots will be rife with fraud, interfering with on-time delivery of mail-in ballots through slowing down the US mail, refusing to condemn white nationalist violence, having his appointees at the Department of Homeland Security suppress a threat assessment about the dangers of right-wing violence in the U.S., and threatening to unleash his inner vicious, Donald Trump is setting the stage for a post-election right-wing uprising before all the votes get counted. And should he lose the election, the Florida “Brooks Brothers riot” of the 2000 Bush/Gore debacle will look like a genteel tea party.
The 2000 presidential election came down to who would win in Florida would become president. After start-and-stop recounts and the intervention of courts at every level, the U.S. Supreme Court declared Texas Governor George W. Bush, the Republican candidate, the victor over Vice President Al Gore, the Democrat. The vote recount process in Florida was gobsmackingly chaotic; remember those hanging chads. Organized Republican Party ruffians physically intimidated the people responsible for counting the votes. Twenty years later, well-dressed Republicans goons could morph into armed militia thugs.
As The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein recently noted that, “Gore wanted to fight solely in the courts, though that meant ceding the streets to Republicans, who held raucous rallies accusing Democrats of trying to steal the election from the GOP nominee, George W. Bush, including one showdown in the Miami-Dade elections-board offices that became immortalized as the “Brooks Brothers riot.”
This time around, with the country dramatically more polarized than twenty years ago, two political phenomena are converging. The rise of domestic paramilitary groups explicitly supporting a sitting president is coupled with Trump setting the stage for a post-election violent offensive by these groups and individuals. Trump appears to be preparing his supporters for armed insurrection if he loses the November election.
The Daily Kos’ David Neiwert recently reported that according to a whistleblowers complaint, the Department of Homeland Security chief Chad Wolf and others in the department tried to alter or shelve intelligence assessments of “concerns about white nationalism while playing up the right’s concocted bogeyman, ‘antifa.’”
The spread of toxic white nationalism and its always-attendant violence has become, as Renée Graham at the Boston Globe observes, another kind of pandemic that Trump has downplayed and allowed to spread. Predicated by his mutual embrace of the far right in the 2015-2016 campaign, Trump’s election to the presidency unleashed a Pandora’s box of white-nationalist demons, beginning with a remarkable surge in hate crimes during his first month, and then his first two years, in office. Its apotheosis has come in the form of a rising tide of far-right mass domestic terrorism and mass killings, as well the spread of armed right-wing ‘Boogaloo’ radicals and militiamen creating mayhem amid civil unrest around the nation.
According to Neiwert, “The whistleblower’s complaint … .claims that Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, DHS’s second-highest-ranking official, ordered Murphy to modify intelligence assessments in order to make the white-supremacist threat ‘appear less severe.’ He also wanted the assessments to include information on ‘left-wing’ groups and antifa.
On September 14th, the Washington Post reported that Michael Caputo, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, who has interfered with the CDC’s coronavirus communications to make them more supportive of Trump’s pronouncements, released Facebook videos that promote an armed response to the presidential election.
“He also predicted that Trump would win the election but that Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee would refuse to concede. ‘And when Donald Trump refuses to stand down at the inauguration, the shooting will begin,’ he warned in the video. ‘The drills that you’ve seen are nothing. If you carry guns, buy ammunition, ladies and gentlemen, because it’s going to be hard to get.’”
Caputo is now stepping aside for mental health reasons for a two-month period.
Trump vows to be ‘really vicious’
In a recent speech in Nevada, Trump vowed to be “really vicious” in the campaign. Setting aside the reality that since he announced for the presidency in 2015, he has been “really vicious,” his viciousness this time he is hell bent on stirring up a coterie of his armed and dangerous supporters.
In the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd, hundreds of thousands of peaceful protesters marched in cities all across the country. While some demonstrators have caused fires and engaged in violent confrontations with the police, the vast majority have been peaceful. It is the arrival of right-wing agitators and armed vigilantes that appears to have ratcheted up the violence.
In a recent speech at a rally in Nevada, Trump again claimed that mail-in voting was rife with fraud and that if he loses, the election is rigged. Bill Mosley writing for the Washington Socialist sketched out a potential nightmare scenario, harkening back to the 2000 chad-counting debacle in Florida when Republican operatives stormed vote-counting sites.
Election-night news coverage shows a close election, especially in crucial swing states, with Trump holding a slight lead. Even well past midnight the networks can’t call the election because an unprecedented number of ballots has been submitted by mail and much of it is yet to be counted. Election night passes into the morning with no declared winner as election boards all over the country are sifting through millions of uncounted ballots. Since Trump condemns mail-in voting and the Democrats have embraced it, Biden is likely to gain in this late count. This gives Trump the opening to claim unfriendly state governments are trying to use ‘fraudulent’ mail voting to steal the election from him, especially those in swing states with Democratic governors such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada and North Carolina. Republican governors try to halt the count in their states. Amidst the chaos, Trump’s Second Amendment boys descend on election boards with their hardware, while Biden futilely pleads for calm while the votes are counted. It’s unclear where this story would end, but it would make the 2000 debacle look like a picnic.”
Republicans believe “using force” will save American way of life
How likely is this scenario? Consider a recent study by Vanderbilt University political scientist, Larry M. Bartels, which appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
“Most Republicans in a January 2020 survey agreed that ‘the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.’ More than 40% agreed that ‘a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.’ (In both cases, most of the rest said they were unsure; only one in four or five disagreed.)”
Bartels pins these attitudes on what he calls “ethnic antagonism,” “concerns about the political power and claims on government resources of immigrants, African-Americans, and Latinos. The strong tendency of ethnocentric Republicans to countenance violence and lawlessness, even prospectively and hypothetically, underlines the significance of ethnic conflict in contemporary US politics.”
According to The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein, “The long-term implication of Bartels’s findings is that Trump’s eventual departure from the White House, whether in 2020 or 2024, is unlikely to excise from Republican circles a desire to strain, or even break, democratic norms if that’s what it takes to hold power. That sentiment could even deepen across the GOP coalition over the next decade, as the country continues to diversify. The more immediate implication of Bartels’s study is that a significant portion of Trump’s voters may be inclined to stand with him if he tries to contest a defeat in November.
Preparing for the Trumpian inevitable?
“A wide array of progressive groups is already coordinating efforts to ensure substantial public protest after the election to defend the vote counting,” Brownstein writes. “Their assumption is that Trump will try to intimidate state officials tabulating mail-in ballots by mobilizing the same sort of armed supporters who poured into Midwestern capitals to protest the coronavirus lockdowns in the spring and confronted Black Lives Matter protesters over the summer. The intent on the left, if it comes to that, is to meet Trump’s demonstrators with overwhelming numbers; the goal is to establish a presence more reminiscent of the street uprisings in Eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the more recent prodemocracy protests in Ukraine and Hong Kong, than of anything in modern American experience.”
One of Joe Biden’s cited appeals to more moderate voters is that he is seen as the candidate who is best able to bridge the right/left divide and bring the country together. But this doesn’t mean the Biden campaign is downplaying the Trump insurrection threat. According to The New York Times and multiple other sources, the Biden-Harris campaign has proactively set up a legal war room that will mobilize hundreds of lawyers to deal with pre-and-post-election challenges to mail in votes. They have also asked Eric Holder, the former Obama Attorney General to serve as a liaison to the many independent groups that are preparing to respond to a Trump challenge to peaceful vote tabulation and eventual transfer of power.
“I’m expecting things to escalate not just up to the election, but beyond the election and into next year, because I don’t think this election’s going to be finalized until weeks after because of mail-in ballots and everything, and I also think there are going to be lawsuits filed by each political party to prolong vote counts or contest them,” former DHS terrorism analyst Daryl Johnson -- who wrote the earlier and prescient 2009 DHS bulletin about rising far-right organizing and recruitment, that was gutted after a major right-wing media assault – told the Daily Kos’ Dave Neiwert.
Whether it's prolonged legal skirmishes, intimidation of election vote counters or – more frightening, street protests and confrontations including armed militia members, we may be facing an unprecedented 2020 November and December.