We Can't Unify around Fascism

Vance and Cannon remind us Donald is not the only danger

Like most Americans, I too want the national temperature to be lowered. I want to see the violent rhetoric to stop. And I want to see our nation unified.

But the other side seems to be saying that, in order for that to happen, we’re not allowed to talk about Donal'd’s record of lawlessness, cruelty, and incompetence and we must make concessions to the would-be dictator.

On Monday, while Republicans tried to shame their critics into silence by making false and increasingly incendiary claims that it was Democrats who are responsible for creating the context in which Saturday’s shooting took place, we were reminded just how dangerous things will get if Donald wins this election.

Today, Aileen Cannon, Donald’s personal pocket judge, took the shocking (but not surprising) and illogical step of dismissing the charges against my uncle. Her behavior since acquiring this case has been abysmal and partisan; she has frequently skated across the line of malpractice. Her repeatedly putting her thumb on the scale in favor of the defense (who am I kidding?—she acted like she was lead counsel for the defense) felt even worse, because we know Donald is guilty. We know he stole our national security documents; we know held them in non-secure locations; and we know he refused to return them. We know these things because we witnessed Donald commit the crimes—and he confessed to them over and over again.

There is no way to interpret Cannon’s decision other than as a political favor from a corrupt judge who, along with the illegitimate super-majority of the Supreme Court (especially Clarence Thomas) is determined to put Donald above the law.

Try to imagine an entire federal judiciary made up of Aileen Cannons. Because that’s what’s coming if Donald Trump’s Project 2025 is implemented. One of the chief tenets of the Heritage Foundation’s controversial and comprehensive fascist playbook, that was specifically designed to shape a second Donald administration, is firing dedicated and non-partisan civil servants in order to replace them with people willing to take a loyalty oath not to the Constitution but to Donald. The corruption currently overtaking the federal judiciary will infiltrate absolutely every

aspect of our government.

It’s terrifying, and that’s why I refuse to be quiet—we all should.

In his book essential book On Tyranny,

Tim Snyder writes that the first lesson is,

Do not obey in advance. Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repress will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You’ve already done this, haven’t you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.

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What happened at Donald’s rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday was deeply wrong and un-American. The same can be said of his plans for this country if he’s put in the Oval Office again. We can’t be quiet. We can’t let the side that continues to traffic in violent political rhetoric blame us shame us or scare us into silence. We must continue to sound the warnings—there will be no pivoting to unity and peace. There will only be Donald and his sycophants and enablers being exactly what we have known them to be.

This morning, while pundits and columnists were, once again, falling for the promise to pivot to unity, Donald simply couldn’t help himself. In response to Cannon’s horrifying ruling, he called for the “dismissal of ALL the Witch Hunts—the January 6th Hoax in Washington, D.C., the Manhattan D.A.’s Zombie Case, the New York A.G. Scam, Fake Claims about a woman I never met (a decades old photo in a line with her then husband does not count), and the Georgia ‘Perfect’ Phone Call charges.” 

(Given the state of play, we can’t rule out his getting his way, but let’s take note that in the process of reveling in his seemingly limitless immunity, he once again defamed E. Jean Carroll.)

All of this, he claimed was necessary in order to “END all Weaponization of our Justice System.”

That’s not how you unify the country or lower the temperature. But let’s be real — the man who divided us during a global pandemic as it killed thousands of American every day, who incited a violent insurrection against his own country does not want unity. Division is the water in which Donald has always swum. Even if it didn’t benefit him politically, he wouldn’t be able to help himself. But, with the help of tens of millions of Americans, he has found a way to benefit from the very division he creates even as it’s at the expense of everybody else

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Not long after Cannon’s corrupt gift to him, Donald announced the selection of Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate. If his goal was to pick a hypocritical bully and revanchist sycophant, he could not have made a better choice. Clearly, Vance thinks he’s immune to the kind of consequences suffered by Donald’s former Vice President—you know, the guy who almost got hanged by Donald’s mob—but I’d still suggest that Vance watch his back.

Vance is stronger than Pence when it comes to pursuing his own interests, but he’s as transactional as Donald. Pence has very few principles, but on one important days, he had least one when it really counted. Despite the enormous amount of pressure that was brought to bear on him, he showed up to do his job on January 6^th. Vance will have no such compunction. If you have any doubts about that, consider his comments to George Stephanopoulos:

“If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there. That is the legitimate way to deal with an election that a lot of folks, including me, think had a lot of problems in 2020.”

Of course, Donald gave this fellow-insurrectionist a promotion. 

Jen O’Malley Dillon of the Biden-Harris campaign, put it this way, “[Donald] picked J.D. Vance as his running mate because Vance will do what Mike Pence wouldn’t on January 6: bend over backwards to enable Trump and his extreme MAGA agenda, even if it means breaking the law and no matter the harm to the American people.

In other words, Donald didn’t want to take a chance that his new running mate would ever put the country first like Pence did. That’s one more guardrail that no longer exists. 

Vance and Cannon are birds of a feather. And there are so many more like them just waiting for their moment to enter the fray. That’s why we can’t be silent now. That’s why we fight.

Let’s all unify around that.