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The “election audit” in Arizona continues, with Republican hacks handling the ballots in ways that pretty clearly violate federal law — and now we’re learning there’s an open router connected to the auditing computers. It’s not just a scam — the FBI/DOJ is investigating it as an actual crime.

But that “audit” is all about massaging Donald Trump’s psychopathic ego, helping him with his Lost Cause of “proving” he “won” the 2020 election. We laugh because it’s not going to end up throwing Joe Biden out of the White House and re-installing Trump, as his followers on social media believe will happen sometime this summer.

But what about 2024?

Protect Democracy is a nonpartisan nonprofit that supports and monitors the democratic process in America and it’s counsel, Erica Newland, concluded that if the Republicans take the House and Senate in next year’s elections then no matter who the GOP candidate is in 2024, and no matter how much he or she loses the election by, that person will become president.

As Michelle Goldberg reported in a The New York Times article ominously titled How Republicans Could Steal the 2024 Election, Newland laid it out:

“It occurred to me,” she told her colleagues [earlier this year], “as I dug into the rules and watched what happened, that if the current Republican Party controls both Houses of Congress on Jan. 6, 2025, there’s no way if a Democrat is legitimately elected they will get certified as the president-elect.”

Ari Berman and Nick Surgey lay out for Mother Jones exactly how a billionaire-funded group is actively working with Republicans across the country to rig the 2024 election in advance. They note:

In a private meeting last month with big-money donors, the head of a top conservative group boasted that her outfit had crafted the new voter suppression law in Georgia and was doing the same with similar bills for Republican state legislators across the country. “In some cases, we actually draft them for them,” she said, “or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe.”

How is it it that criminality like that — openly working to rig or overturn elections, even in advance — has become “normal” and acceptable, rewarded behavior among legislators in the Republican Party? Where do these people come from?

It turns out there are a lot of psychopaths — career criminals who are high-functioning — who rise to the highest levels of power within big companies. A recent study presented at the 2016 annual meeting of the APS found that:

“…while one in 100 people in the general community and one in five people in the prison system are considered psychopathic, these traits are common in the upper echelons of the corporate world, with a prevalence of between 3% and 21%.”

And now they’re moving into politics. Over the last 40 years, competent professional criminals like Trump and some of the Arizona state senators running this “audit” scam — and their fellow psychopaths among some of the billionaires funding legislation being passed right now in states across the country to pre-rig the 2024 election — have increasingly moved out of the business world and into politics.

The FBI even has an extensive part of their website at fbi.gov dedicated to identifying and dealing with these high-functioning “invisible” psychopaths. “Possession of a sense of superiority and lack of empathy can enable them,” the FBI notes, “to boast about the brilliance of their latest fraud scheme.”

“Corporate psychopaths with exceptional verbal skills make crafty interviewees,” the FBI adds. They also can make crafty politicians.

We can thank the Supreme Court for the enthusiastic migration of psychopaths into politics. And for their seeming invisibility.

Most Americans, looking at all these “election integrity” laws and today’s purge of pro-democracy politicians like Liz Cheney within the GOP, don’t understand how a party could “suddenly” become so corrupt and blatantly criminal. Where did these people come from?

It turns out that there are, among us, a small number of individuals who are career criminals because they’re high-functioning psychopaths. They have literally spent their entire lives — from childhood through adulthood — skirting or outright breaking the law, and not only believe the law doesn’t apply to them, but actually delight in getting away with their crimes.

Because all of us have, at one time or another in our lives, broken a law or told lies, we tend to assume that these people are just like us “but got caught in that one unlucky moment,” like that time you drove home after a second glass of wine, or made up a lie to get out of work for a day.

But they’re not like you and me. There’s something fundamentally different about psychopaths. And the failure to recognize that goes to the core of the crisis within the Republican Party — which has become a magnet for such people — and our overall political system today.

Back when I was in my early 20s, I got a job as the manager of a GNC store in a mall in Okemos, Michigan. There was a test that I had to give to all job applicants to determine their “honesty.”

The test asked really weird questions, along the lines of:

One of your very best employees just came to you to return some money to the till, money that she had borrowed from the till because a few months back she needed it to help pay for an emergency medical procedure for her child. She has saved up to pay the money back, and is now trying to do so. What do you do?

Or: Your mother just called and told to you that she’s been shoplifting at the local store when her food stamps run out and your younger sister is really hungry. What do you do?

The test, from a national testing chain, went on with 20 or 30 similar questions. In almost every case, the only correct answer to the multiple choice test was, “call the police and send them to jail.”

I protested to my district manager, saying that I would’ve flunked the damn test, or would’ve had to lie to pass it. There’s no way I turn in my mother or call the police on an employee with a sick child.

My manager told me, “The only way to pass the ‘honesty test’ is to lie on it,” and added that it was actually designed that way. They want people to say that they will call the police even for the tiniest of crimes. I protested that I thought that was crazy, that we were requiring people to lie to pass an honesty test, and that made no sense at all to me.

What he explained gave me my first real-world insight into psychopaths: there are, he said, some people who really, genuinely, deeply are always untrustworthy at best, or criminal at worst. It’s how they’re wired.

Turns out there’s no test in the world that can tell if a person really and truly will or will not call the police on anyone. But the test does tell whether a person understands the difference between right and wrong. It’s a flag for psychopathy.

“I know it’s hard for you to realize or believe,” he said, as I recall, “but there are some people who literally don’t know or care what is right and what is wrong. And the people who don’t have that basic understanding, or don’t think the rules apply to them, are the ones most likely to steal from us or let their friends come shoplifting. The test helps identify such people.”

One of the big challenges the American media and our political system have with this era’s Republicans is that, like the people I was testing to try to filter out from our potential pool of employees, the GOP is now filled with and funded by actual career criminals with no deep understanding of, or respect for, right and wrong.

Donald Trump has been scamming, grifting and stealing his entire life, going all the way back to stealing his father’s money from his parents and his siblings. He’s a career criminal, as are many of his acolytes in Congress and politics and apparently some of the billionaires who fund his “movement.”

Witness the numerous members of Congress who’ve been busted or at least outed for everything from giving no bid contracts to their own companies (Cheney and Halliburton) to putting bricks of bribe cash into their freezers (Rep. Jefferson). Even Forbes magazine called Trump’s Commerce Secretary, billionaire Wilbur Ross, a professional “grifter” for all the scams he’s perpetrated in his career.

While fundamentally dishonest psychopaths have been a problem for our society and business community for centuries, it has particularly become a problem in our political world since 1976 and 1978, when the Supreme Court explicitly ruled that billionaires or corporations giving massive amounts of money to politicians and political parties is no longer considered bribery or corruption but, instead, is “free speech” protected by the First Amendment.

Never before in all of American history had bribing politicians been considered free-speech, until the Buckley v Valejo and First National Bank v Belotti Supreme Court decisions. In 2010, conservatives on the Court doubled down on these decisions and even expanded their scope with Citizens United, as I lay out in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America.

The result of these SCOTUS decisions in the 1970s was an ocean of corporate and billionaire money flowing into politics, sweeping Ronald Reagan into the White House. It was the start of the rise of psychopaths within the GOP.

In the 40+ years since then, billionaire bribery of politicians has become the norm, and is now even institutionalized with national and state-based “policy networks,” PACs and SuperPACs, and dark money groups like the ones pushing anti-democracy legislation in state after state.

All this money now sloshing around in our political system has produced the result the dissenting Supreme Court justices worried about. It’s become a giant magnet that draws career criminals and psychopaths into politics, and then helps them become fabulously wealthy as they do the bidding of the corporations and rich people who fund their elections and careers.

It’s normalized the “revolving door” where people go into government positions, particularly in regulatory agencies, and make decisions that benefit giant corporations while drawing a modest government paycheck, only then to leave government and pick up multi-million-dollar-a-year jobs in the industries they were regulating.

The GOP has become the party of psychopaths and career criminals.

Today it would simply be the old Eisenhower/Nixon corrupt-but-not-terribly-criminal GOP if the Supreme Court, back in the 1970s, hadn’t struck down the “good government” laws that came out of the Nixon bribery scandals and older laws to keep money — and the psychopaths who accumulate huge piles of it — out of politics. Some of those laws, like the Tillman Act, dated all the way back to 1907.

Because of these Supreme Court decisions equating money with free speech, the Republican Party is now overrun with and funded by grifters, con artists and psychopathic career criminals.

And an easy way to see it is to simply look at the billionaire’s war-like response to HR1/SB1/The For The People Act, which ends much of politicians’ ability to engage in criminal behavior like accepting bribes or rigging elections. Psychopaths and megalomaniacs always fight against anything that will control or regulate their behavior.

For America to survive as a democratic republic, we must restore the legal guardrails that keep psychopaths from entering, controlling or buying our political process. And we must hold the obvious psychopaths and their enablers — the Former Guy and those in Congress who encouraged and continue to baldly lie about the January 6th insurrection attempt — to account.

To reduce the power of psychopaths in politics, we must pass the For The People Act or similar legislation that psychopath-proofs our political system. We must stop them from continuing their efforts to rig the 2024 election.

And we must prosecute the criminals involved with the past administration and within the current GOP who committed so many crimes during the past four years and continue to lie about January’s attempted treason.

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