Sleepwalking to a Dictatorship but Only on Day One

Johnson went ahead anyway, even telling members that the brief didn't assert fraud, which it did, so he misled members to get their signatures. On January 6th, 139 House Republicans would accordingly vote to overthrow the election. Most of them were re-elected in 2022.

So in Trump's thrall is Johnson, that he is using his post to sanitize the history of that day. He thinks there should be transparency so unlike McCarthy's reluctance he is releasing all of the video footage taken January 6th. The motive is obvious. Propagandists can now assemble a trove of only the segments of rioters ambling through the great halls of the Capitol in awe of its grandeur. Video showing them in a bloody fight against the Capitol police and breaking into the building so that they can be awestruck will be snipped out. Just peaceful tourists. What insurrection? Johnson let the genie out of the box, to use Trump's malaprop:

"We're going through a methodical process of releasing [the video] as quickly as we can. As you know, we have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in the events of that day because we don't want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ."

For Johnson, second in line for the presidency, to be identified and arrested for bludgeoning police and engaging in insurrection is to be "retaliated against". Obstructing an investigation by a federal law enforcement agency by hiding the identities of persons in the act of committing a crime against the country is Johnson's idea of holding to his oath to the Constitution.

The man Johnson is so eager to serve was given a full fact-check-free hour on what continues to call itself a news channel. We were pleased to hear Donald Trump tell Fox News's Sean Hannity he
Hannity
will not be a dictator. When Hannity first asked, "Do you in any way have any plans whatsoever if re-elected president to abuse power, to break the law, to use the government to go after people?", Trump dodged the question. Sean tried again later:

Hannity: "Under no circumstances you are promising America tonight you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody…"

Trump: "Except for Day One. I wanna close the border and I wanna drill, drill, drill."

Hannity: "That's not retribution".

Trump: "I love this guy. He says, 'you're not gonna be a dictator, are ya?' I said no, no no, other than Day One…After that, I'm not a dictator".

Eager for America to have its first dictator, Hannity's audience clapped and whooped deliriously. By the way, Trump's "drill, drill, drill" is misinformed nonsense. The U.S. produces more oil and gas than both Saudi Arabia and Russia. For one who wants to be president, his not knowing that earned ridicule from "Morning Joe"'s Joe Scarborough:

"What a stupid thing to say — drill, drill, drill. You can tell he doesn't read the newspapers…People who applaud 'drill, drill, drill', how stupid they are because that's what we're doing right now."

Trump went on to say that had he still been president,

"You wouldn't have had Ukraine and Russia, you wouldn't have had the attack on Israel. We would have withdrawn from Afghanistan with tremendous strength and power. That's the way I had it set up."

Cassidy Hutchinson, the former aide to Trump's chief of staff Mark Meadows, had already told the House select committee investigating
Hutchinson
January 6th, that on hearing Attorney General Bill Barr say that the the Justice Department had found no evidence of fraud in the 2020 election, Trump had hurled his lunch against a wall in the White House and she and others had to scrub off the ketchup. Talking to MSNBCs Lawrence O'Donnell this past week, she said there had been several such incidents, that the 45th president was incapable of controlling himself and erupted often:

"Of all the reasons that Donald Trump should never be anywhere close to the Oval Office again, this may seem like a minor one — but his volcanic temper. He deserves to be nowhere near the nuclear code buttons."

Ms. Hutchinson also revealed that Rudy Giuliani told her Trump planned to go to the Capitol. His apologists have said he had no plans to as a way to dissociate him from the insurrection.

Liz Cheney on CBS's "Sunday Morning" cautioned,

"People who say, well, if he's elected, it's not that dangerous
Cheney
because we have all these checks and balances, don't fully understand the extent to which the Republicans in Congress today have been co-opted. One of the things we see happening today is sort of a sleepwalking into dictatorship in the United States."

On NBC's "The Today Show" there was this exchange:

Savannah Guthrie: "Do you believe that if Donald Trump were elected next year that he would try to stay in office beyond a second term?

Cheney: There's no question.

Guthrie: You think he would try to stay in power forever.

Cheney: Absolutely. He's already done it once. He's already attempted to seize power and he was stopped, thankfully, and for the good of the nation and the republic.

In keeping with his saying the press is the “enemy of the people”, invoking the same phrase that Twentieth Century dictators had used — Stalin, Hitler, Mao — Trump hinted at one of his dictatorship plans when 13 minutes into "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell", the prime-time show on MSNBC, Trump posted on Truth Social this tweet, or as they call it over there, a "truth":

O'Donnell picked up on that in the following night's show saying,

"The man who Republican members of Congress call 'Orange Jesus' wants to shut down MSNBC…and we know what Donald Trump
O'Donnell
means by 'come down hard'. He means completely destroy; he means violently attack the way he wanted Trump supporters to come down hard on Congress on January 6."

O'Donnell ridiculed him:

"I would call that a lie if I didn't think Donald Trump was too stupid to know that that is a lie."

Why? Because television for Trump originated when there was only over-the-airwaves broadcasting by the three networks, NBC, ABC, CBS. He was 40 when cable arrived but, as O'Donnell chides,

"Obviously no one explained to Donald why they called it cable television. So, to this day, he does not know that cable television has never been broadcast over free government-approved airwaves, which is why cable television, unlike the old broadcast networks, has never been subject to FCC jurisdiction in any way… which is why you hear all that profanity on HBO."

O'Donnell says he was the only one to call Trump a liar when in 2011 Trump began questioning Barack Obama's birth certificate and whether he was born in the United States. (The New York Times didn't call Trump a liar until 2016.) Trump had tried to get him fired then and again in 2015.

O'Donnell looked at the news broadcasts of the same day of Trump's threat to come down hard on MSNBC and made the observation that,

"[T]his country has reached the point where the former president of the United States, who is the leading Republican candidate for president, has publicly threatened to shut down a cable network and that is not news. If any previous president or leading presidential candidate in either party ever made such a threat, it would have been the lead story in every news organization in the country — every TV channel, every newspaper — and now it is not news."

The three broadcast networks deliver news to 20 million viewers each night, far more than all other television sources combined, but Trump's portent for MSNBC earned nary a mention on the nightly news of NBC, ABC, or CBS.

It was also a day in which Trump called rival candidate Nikki Haley a "birdbrain", but that got no mention on the big three. Bigger still on this same day, Trump said in a post he was "looking at alternatives" to Obamacare. Something that "would have been the lead story in campaign coverage but was completely ignored", said O'Donnell, who wrapped up with:

"The news media is going to fail again in covering the presidency. It's going to fail. Do not think you can depend on the news media to cover this campaign correctly. You are going to have to do that work yourself. You are going to have to save democracy, if it's going to be saved, yourself. It is going to be up to you."

a red state example

All of what we relate above was reported in the liberal media. Conservative media reported none of it other than, as in the Hannity example, treated it as a joke. What is happening is kept from the Trump worshippers by the rightwing media.

Liz Cheney told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow:

"[M]any of those in Wyoming who were the most upset or angry were unaware of the violence on January 6. They believed the day to have been almost entirely peaceful. They read The Epoch Times, a news [air quotes] website that presents extremely slanted reporting in the guise of a straightforward media outlet. They believed what they saw on their social-media feeds. They watched almost exclusively Fox News or Newsmax or OAN. As a result, they were completely unaware of what had actually happened."

And with the election coming, there is therefore no breaking through to them. They will blindly vote for Trump.

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