Lincoln.
To whom, at Raleigh, North Carolina, yesterday, Donald Trump compared himself, boasting he got more Republican primary votes than Lincoln. Even though the population in 1860 was a tenth of what it is today. Even though there were no Republican primaries in 1860. “I got more than Honest Abe.” Tens of millions of people will actually vote for this diseased narcissist today.
The 1860 vote was crucial, but civil war was likely despite the outcome. Itwas the 1864 election, four years later, that was life-or-death. As late as August of that year, some Republicans were talking about holding a second convention, withdrawing their renomination of Lincoln, and finding somebody else.
They, and the leadership—and Lincoln himself—were convinced that as things stood, Lincoln would not be reelected, and would lose to the Democratic candidate, George McClellan. McClellan was the general who had nearly lost the Civil War to the South, had been twice replaced, and was now running on a Democratic platform of immediately ending the war, negotiating a settlement of any kind with the South, and repudiating the Emancipation Proclamation, which had freed three million Americans from slavery barely eighteen months before.
And it was believed—nationwide—that Lincoln was going to lose to him. In a landslide.
Then, on September 2, 1864, the Union Army, led by General William Tecumseh Sherman, took Atlanta—at which point, from the North to the South, the outcome of the Civil War became a foregone conclusion.
The political fortunes of Lincoln and McClellan changed violently. One hundred fifty-two years ago today, Abraham Lincoln was reelected by 212 Electoral College votes, to McClellan’s 21 votes. The tragic war was seen through to its conclusion, slavery was not restored, the United States of America was not split in two, the nation did not commit suicide.
And yet, in the popular vote, nearly all of it from only the northern states, 45 percent of our ancestors . . . still voted against Lincoln. Voted against finishing the war they were winning. Voted against freeing the slaves. Voted for national suicide.
Forty-five percent.
That’s how deadly serious today is.
*
There have been other moments when democracy could have died. The Revolution itself. The British burning of Washington in 1814. The Civil War, obviously, especially at Gettysburg, where Lincoln became immortal; where Trump threatened to file vengeance lawsuits. The Great Depression and the prospect of a full-on Communist revolution, or a full-on right-wing military coup. Both world wars. The Cuban Missile Crisis. Watergate. September 11 and the proposal by one elected official that in the aftermath of terror, the end of his term should be delayed by three months. (That elected official was, of course, the mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani.)
The democracy—the country—are more fragile, and have faced more perils, than most of us ever choose to admit. But nearly always, these perils have been external and have unified us, and have not been the result of a kind of cancer not merely growing from within the country, but fed and fueled and nurtured and exploited by a psychopathic liar who has gamed democracy and is still, this very day, positioned to destroy democracy by means of the very freedoms it provides—freedoms that he would happily, and immediately, extinguish.
That’s how deadly serious today is.
*
Each life-or-death moment in our 240 years as the closest thing to true freedom in the history of this planet has been met with courage and wisdom and unity, and especially sacrifice the likes of which few of us personally know, or can truly imagine.
And in none of them—not the British invasion, not the Civil War, not the Depression, not World War I, not World War II, not the Cuban Missile Crisis, not Watergate, not 9/11—were we afforded such an easy means of escape, such a simple method of protection, as rests in every man and every woman in every voting booth in every community in this country today.
We do not have to go to war.
We do not have to force a president from office.
We do not have to forestall a revolution.
We do not have to keep nuclear missiles from flying.
We do not have to recover from terrorism.
The Trump Crisis of 2016—national suicide—the death of the United States of America—can be prevented . . .
By voting.
That’s how deadly serious today is.
THE TERRORISTS HAVE WON
Post date • WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 9
I’d like to begin by congratulating the FBI on its successful coup against the electoral process of the United States of America. You’ve been working on one of these for a while, boys, and I know everybody at the Bureau’s just delighted that the “F” can now also stand for “Fascist.”
Also let us acknowledge something a little larger and a little less removed from treasonous malfeasance:
The terrorists have won.
This, after all, was their goal, fifteen long, sad years ago.
To strip from the world’s foremost power its traditions of relative and growing tolerance. To hamstring the international influence of a country that rarely stuck to the double white line of the moral road but came closer than any other. To take our energies from trying—more or less—to help the world move forward, and instead to make us direct those energies inward, at one another, within our own borders.
To divide us so, to complete the rupture of our settled, bizarre culture that for so long had been based on the inner monologue of “I really can’t stand those people in the other party, or the other state, or of the other color, but my strongest emotion is going to remain annoyance rather than hate, because we are all Americans and we are all in this together.”
Today—officially—that’s gone.
Obviously, the perpetrators of 9/11 had other designs that have yet to come to pass—the destabilization of all the secular states of the Middle East, the rising up of a caliphate, etc.—but for the moment, that’s not important to our discussions here.
Because the premise of the 2001 terrorism here was to take those divisions that were already then apparent in American society and multiply them by fear—fear of more attacks, of sedition, of disloyalty, of weakness, of difference, of immigrants, of minorities, of the loss of the playing field that was still tilted toward white people but was leveling just a little more every year.
It took a long time.
A long time for hatred and fear to find some figure here who would pander to it. Someone whose ego and lust for power would be the perfect vessel to exploit our collective post-traumatic stress disorder. Someone who would say anything, do anything, have an answer for everything even if the answer was made up out of whole cloth and on the spot.
The goals of those who attacked us in 2001 finally found an outlet. And last night, Americans—certainly half of them with no more sense of the permanence or importance of their decision than they brought to their votes for American Idol—opened the door and put the spokesman for hate and fear and bluster and, most of all, incompetence . . . in charge of the nation.
Collectively we have slit our own throats. We ordered, mixed, drank, and paid the bill for our own poison.
There is an irony that might be noticed in our upcoming months and years of free fall—namely, that the first victims of this act of mass madness will be many of those who pushed hardest for it and put the most faith in it. The economic impacts will be felt long before the inauguration in January—hell, long before Thanksgiving—and the Rust Belt states that turned against democracy and diversity yesterday will doubtless be the first to be consumed by job loss and financial panic and privation.
Cold comfort, indeed.
So what is next?
If you look for transformation within the new elected leader, fat chance. Nothing has changed him in seventy years, and if there is anything to guarantee that he will not temper his Hitlerian personality, that h
e will not be restrained by any remaining adults among Republican leadership in the House or the Senate, that he will not reach out to those who did not vote for him—if anything could actually increase his obstinacy and refusal to share or delegate—it would be this extraordinary, unprecedented development in American history.
Right now he thinks he is Superman.
*
But of course, he is not. The economy will be a complete shambles by the time the oath is administered, and there will be no fix available from making great deals, corner-cutting, or bellowing, “I’m not paying for sloppy work.”
He, of course, will insist that everything is great and that his mere presence will assure we have made America great, and anybody who thinks otherwise is disloyal or an ISIS sympathizer or somebody he’s going to sue.
As the standard of living plummets, he will try a diversion—the wall or the deportations—but boy, those things take time, so he’ll probably do what they all do when there is no fix to the vital day-to-day issues: a war, or some bizarre gambit in the Middle East that will in fact restore ISIS and destabilize the world just a little bit more every week.
It will be bad. It will be very bad. Americans, and others, will die.
But, necessarily, there will be blowback.
There always is.
Blowback against the good—as this election just showed.
But also blowback against the bad. And at some juncture, soon, there will be a Resistance. Those of us who warned against and pleaded against and fought against this madness will find avenues for dissent that will have enough support to at least impede the monster. Put any title you like in front of his name and this is still an aggressively self-destructive man, and it will be the goal of the Resistance to help him in that task.
At some other juncture, soon or late, probably even before the midterms of 2018, a tipping point will be reached. Whether it’s war or the economy or some wild card we can’t see yet that is bouncing around in that great stash of funhouse mirrors in his head—it will be the Republican governors and the Republican senators and the Republican congressmen who will see the crowds of Republican voters demanding action against the irresponsible and delusional president, and an impeachment will begin—of what is nominally a Republican president, by a Republican Congress.
None of that is guaranteed, but it should be noted that Richard Nixon was not forced from office until his Republican colleagues acted in concert with Democrats to remove him. Moreover, the political history of this country for the past fifty years has been a series of wild pendulum swings—from the Civil Rights Acts to Richard Nixon in three years, from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush in three seconds . . . from Barack Obama to this creature in less than three months.
And if this creature is still in charge of this government and has not yet fled the country, then there are those midterms in 2018 and the attempt to begin a Restoration. Unless he acts in the interim against free elections, and I would never assume that in a nightmare like this, the Freddy Krueger in chief suddenly starts obeying the laws.
In any event, I leave you with two quotes. It’s H. L. Mencken from 1926, and the long form actually is: “No one in this world, so far as I know . . . has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”
The other, of course, is: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” This is attributed to Abraham Lincoln, and it pretty much sums up that phase of the American experiment that the electorate ended last night. Because there’s no real evidence that Lincoln ever said that.
In short, you can fool all the people just long enough to become the first anti-democracy president of the United States.
That’s . . .
Oh, wait—one more thing. Conceit, probably. Whistling past graveyards, perhaps. A little Churchill, adjusted to the occasion.
Even though large tracts of America and many old and famous states have fallen or may fall into the grip of Trump and all the odious apparatus of Trump rule, we shall not flag or fail.
We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in state legislatures, we shall fight in the stores and the banks, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our America, whatever the cost may be.
We shall fight online, we shall fight in the press and on the television, we shall fight on the street corners of public opinion. We shall never surrender.
PART II
After:
I’M KEITH OLBERMANN and this is
THE
RESISTANCE
Chapter 4
NOVEMBER, POST–ELECTION DAY
2016
POST-ELECTION, THE CLOSER BECOMES THE RESISTANCE
Post date • WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 16
What do we do now?
This evil is unfolding, like it or not.
It can unfold, and you can lie there.
Or it can unfold, and you can resist.
There are practical means, things you can do.
I intend to offer some in each volume of this new series.
And we start—with something you can accomplish by not doing.
*
It is a week.
We were asked to give him a chance.
This is how he has wasted that chance.
Thirty-three hours after Hillary Clinton’s concession:
“Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!”
The morning he was to announce his first staff appointments:
“Wow, the @nytimes is losing thousands of subscribers because of their very poor and highly inaccurate coverage of the ‘Trump phenomena.’”
“The @nytimes sent a letter to their subscribers apologizing for their BAD coverage of me. I wonder if it will change—doubt it?”
“The @nytimes states today that DJT believes ‘more countries should acquire nuclear weapons.’ How dishonest are they. I never said this!”
Sixty-eight days until his inauguration.
Still bitching about his paranoid fantasies about the media.
Still lying about what he said during the campaign.
Still referring to himself in the third person.
Still obsessing over one newspaper as if he were fifteen and it had refused to go with him . . . to the junior prom.
*
Give him . . . a chance?
What? In the hope that he will someday grow up enough to be able to see over the top of the Oval Office desk?
We do not have time for the White House edition of Celebrity Apprentice starring President-elect Pussygrabber!
*
Give him a chance?
Because we’re all supposed to pretend that this is a normal man and that was a normal election?
Because we’re all supposed to forget that the Russians interfered with the election, and the involvement of the FBI—at minimum—affected the outcome?
Because we’re all going to follow The Washington Post and call them “populists” instead of “white supremacists,” even though Trump’s new chief strategist . . . ran a white supremacist website?
*
Give him a chance?
All we are saying is: Give fascism a chance!
Who knows? It might not be as bad as we think!
It might not be a bottomless pit!
*
This is not my president, and judging by the margin by which Hillary Clinton won the popular vote—at this rate it’ll be larger than Kennedy over Nixon in 1960—this is not America’s president, either.
And so, we will resist.
Each statement of substance or policy or intent will be met . . . with one
of resistance.
Each action and event staged by this man who lost the popular vote . . . will be met . . . with protest by that resistance.
Each politician whom he fooled with the charm from one of his other personalities—from the Vichy Republicans already lining up to lick his boots to the Democrats like this fathead Joe Manchin—will be rejected by that resistance.
*
Since no Democratic or liberal politician has yet stepped forward out of the morass of Politics Inc. to take on the responsibility of the resistance, I—with complete awareness of the presumptuousness and arrogance of this statement—volunteer myself, and will gladly turn over all these burdens to any more legitimate and informed lawmaker or political or cultural leader who has the guts to take these burdens.
I do not want violence, and I am not proposing the overthrow of the government by any means other than legal and political. I think protests should be limited to Washington, Trump Tower, and Trump hotels. I have no pie-in-the-sky plan to have the Electoral College alter the outcome. I will even acquiesce to a President Pence—just get . . . this . . . man . . . out . . . of . . . here.
And I will repeat what I said last week: this Trump is a profoundly and proactively self-destructive individual. It is now our sacred duty to help him finish his self-destruction.
Whether it is going to be him destroyed at his own hands or democracy destroyed at his hands . . . it is going to be him.
And the first step is to complete the delegitimizing of his presidency and his election.
Delegitimizing that he himself began.
Who said the opinion polling was rigged?
Who said the election itself was rigged?
Who refused to say whether he would honor the outcome of that election?
Why, the president-elect did!
And he is the president-elect! We are supposed to give him a chance! We are supposed to believe him!
Trump Is F*cking Crazy (This Is Not a Joke) Page 13