Epilogue
Your weekly excerpt from one of my books. This week: "The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink"
Epilogue
If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.
As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time,
or die by suicide. —Abraham Lincoln, Lyceum Address, 1838
Trump isn’t the first Republican president to have seized the White House by fraud. In fact, the historical pattern is far more disturbing: every Republican president since Eisenhower has either directly stolen the presidency or inherited their position from someone who did.
Nixon started this treasonous tradition in 1968. While President Johnson was desperately working to end the Vietnam War, Nixon secretly sent envoys to persuade South Vietnamese leaders to boycott peace talks, promising them better terms after his election. Johnson discovered this sabotage when the FBI brought him the wiretaps; he confronted Nixon directly, calling it what it was: “This is treason.”1 Nixon’s scheme worked, however, prolonging the war that killed an additional 22,000 Americans and over a million Vietnamese. And Johnson took this crime to his grave; his library didn’t release the tapes for decades.
The pattern continued with Reagan in the election of 1980. As recently confirmed by former Texas House Speaker Ben Barnes, Reagan’s campaign struck a deal with Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini to keep fifty-two American hostages captive until after the election, deliberately sabotaging President Carter’s negotiations for their release.2 The hostages were freed the very minute Reagan was sworn in, and his administration later secretly sold weapons to Iran (leading to the Iran-Contra scandal), thus keeping his corrupt bargain.
George H. W. Bush leveraged Reagan’s illegitimate presidency to get into the White House himself, and then used Attorney General Bill Barr to shut down the Iran-Contra investigation by pardoning six key figures before they could implicate him.3
The Supreme Court handed George W. Bush the presidency in 2000 by halting Florida’s recount, despite Gore winning the popular vote by over 500,000 ballots. A later investigation by major newspapers confirmed Gore would have won Florida under any fair counting standard.4 And let’s not forget that Bush’s brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, purged at least 57,000 mostly Black voters from the rolls just months before the election that was “decided” by fewer than 600 votes.5
Trump continued this tradition in 2016, benefiting from voter suppression orchestrated by Republican secretaries of state and Kris Kobach’s Interstate Crosscheck program that purged millions of legitimate voters—mostly people of color—from the rolls.6 He also benefited from Russian interference through social media manipulation, as documented by Robert Mueller’s investigation.7
Finally, Trump’s payment to silence Stormy Daniels—the crime that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg successfully prosecuted, leading to Trump’s thirty-four felony convictions for election fraud—was crucial to keeping Trump’s candidacy afloat after the “grab ’em by the pussy” scandal. Without those illegal payoffs violating campaign finance laws and keeping the Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal stories under wraps, Trump almost certainly would have lost to Hillary Clinton.
America has ignored GOP crimes to seize the White House for far too long. Ford’s pardon of Nixon set a destructive precedent of presidential immunity that has echoed through decades, leading to packed courts, unnecessary wars, massive tax cuts for billionaires, and the gutting of America’s middle class.
And now it’s been amplified by six Republicans on the Supreme Court ruling that Trump can commit crimes while in office with relative impunity, an immunity that he’s apparently reveling in.
It’s time to break this pattern and finally hold at least one (convicted) criminal Republican president accountable.
I just finished reading this outstanding book. You have clearly put in writing not only his personal messed up history but how the useful idiot was put in power. More importantly though, you show how we can take active steps to fight back against the enormous amount of cash unleashed because in Citizens United.
I'm looking to purchase additional copies to give to my two sons as well as some like minded friends who don't know what we should be. Marching helps but protecting our vote MUCH more important.
Thank you!
One hopes that, should the opportunity arise (unlikely as that increasingly seems), Democratic “leadership” will abandon their compulsive but ultimately counterproductive traditional inclination to make nice-nice, let bygones be bygones, look forward not backward, and all the other self-destructive, crime enabling bullshit that has delivered us to this point. Exhausting as it may be, ALL of the current administration’s many crimes must be investigated, prosecuted, and punished. We have all the talent we need; let them shine.