By
Thom Hartmann
/
AlterNet
People are wondering out loud about the parallels between today’s
Republican Party and organized crime,
and whether “Teflon Don” Trump will remain unscathed through his many
scandals, ranging from interactions with foreign oligarchs to killing
tens of thousands of Americans by denying them healthcare to stepping up
the
destruction of our environment and public lands.
History
suggests – even if treason can be demonstrated – that, as long as he
holds onto the Republican Party (and Fox News), he’ll survive it intact.
And he won’t be the first Republican president to commit high crimes to
get and stay in office.
In fact, Eisenhower was the last legitimately elected Republican president we’ve had in this country.
Since Dwight Eisenhower left the presidency in 1961, six different Republicans have occupied the Oval Office.
And
every single one of them - from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump - have
been illegitimate - ascending to the highest office in the land not
through small-D democratic elections - but instead through fraud and
treason.
(And today’s GOP-controlled Congress is
arguably just as corrupt and illegitimate, acting almost entirely within
the boundaries set by an organized group of billionaires.)
Let’s start at the beginning with Richard Nixon.
In 1968 - President Lyndon Johnson was desperately trying to end the Vietnam war.
But
Richard Nixon knew that if the war continued - it would tarnish
Democrat (and Vice President) Hubert Humphrey’s chances of winning the
1968 election.
So Nixon sent envoys from his campaign to
talk to South Vietnamese leaders to encourage them not to attend an
upcoming peace talk in Paris.
Nixon promised South
Vietnam’s corrupt politicians that he would give them a richer deal when
he was President than LBJ could give them then.
LBJ
found out about this political maneuver to prolong the Vietnam war just 3
days before the 1968 election. He phoned the Republican Senate leader
Everett Dirksen – here’s an excerpt (you can listen to the
entire conversation here):
President Johnson:
Some
of our folks, including some of the old China lobby, are going to the
Vietnamese embassy and saying please notify the [South Vietnamese]
president that if he'll hold out 'til November the second they could get
a better deal. Now, I'm reading their hand, Everett. I don't want to
get this in the campaign.
And they oughtn't to be doin' this. This is treason.
Sen. Dirksen: I know.
Those
tapes were only released by the LBJ library in the past decade, and
that’s Richard Nixon that Lyndon Johnson was accusing of treason.
But by then - Nixon’s plan had worked.
South
Vietnam boycotted the peace talks - the war continued - and Nixon won
the White House thanks to it. As a result, additional tens of thousands
of American soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians,
died as a result of Nixon’s treason.
And Nixon was never held to account for it.
Gerald Ford was the next Republican.
After Nixon left office the same way he entered it - by virtue of breaking the law - Gerald Ford took over.
Ford
was never elected to the White House (he was appointed to replace VP
Spiro Agnew, after Agnew was indicted for decades of taking bribes), and
thus would never have been President had it not been for Richard
Nixon’s treason.
The third was Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980.
He
won thanks to a little something called the October Surprise - when his
people sabotaged then-President Jimmy Carter’s negotiations to release
American hostages in Iran.
According to Iran’s
then-president, Reagan’s people promised the Iranians that if they held
off on releasing the American hostages until just after the election -
then Reagan would give them a sweet weapons deal.
In
1980 Carter thought he had reached a deal with newly-elected Iranian
President Abdolhassan Bani-Sadr over the release of the fifty-two
hostages held by radical students at the American Embassy in Tehran.
"I
openly opposed the hostage-taking throughout the election campaign.... I
won the election with over 76 percent of the vote.... Other candidates
also were openly against hostage-taking, and overall, 96 percent of
votes in that election were given to candidates who were against it
[hostage-taking]."
Carter was confident that with
Bani-Sadr's help, he could end the embarrassing hostage crisis that had
been a thorn in his political side ever since it began in November of
1979. But Carter underestimated the lengths his opponent in the 1980
Presidential election, California Governor Ronald Reagan, would go to
win an election.
Behind Carter's back, the Reagan campaign
worked out a deal with
the leader of Iran's radical faction - Supreme Leader Ayatollah
Khomeini - to keep the hostages in captivity until after the 1980
Presidential election.
This was nothing short of
treason. The Reagan campaign's secret negotiations with Khomeini - the
so-called "October Surprise" - sabotaged Carter and Bani-Sadr's attempts
to free the hostages. And as Bani-Sadr
told The Christian Science Monitor in March of 2013:
After
arriving in France [in 1981], I told a BBC reporter that I had left
Iran to expose the symbiotic relationship between Khomeinism and
Reaganism.
Ayatollah Khomeini
and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known
as the “October Surprise,” which prevented the attempts by myself and
then-US President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 US
presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released
tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.
And Reagan’s treason - just like Nixon’s treason - worked perfectly.
The Iran hostage crisis continued and torpedoed Jimmy Carter's re-election hopes.
And
the same day Reagan took the oath of office - almost to the minute, by
way of Iran’s acknowledging the deal - the American hostages in Iran
were released.
And for that, Reagan began selling the
Iranians weapons and spare parts in 1981, and continued until he was
busted for it in 1986, producing the so-called "Iran Contra" scandal.
But, like Nixon, Reagan was never held to account for the criminal and treasonous actions that brought him to office.
After
Reagan - Bush senior was elected - but like Gerry Ford - Bush was
really only President because he served as Vice President under Reagan.
If
the October Surprise hadn’t hoodwinked voters in 1980 - you can bet
Bush senior would never have been elected in 1988. That's four
illegitimate Republican presidents.
And that brings us to George W. Bush, the man who was given the White House by five right-wing justices on the Supreme Court.
In the
Bush v. Gore
Supreme Court decision in 2000 that stopped the Florida recount and
thus handed George W. Bush the presidency - Justice Antonin Scalia wrote
in his opinion:
"The counting of votes ... does in my
view threaten irreparable harm to petitioner [George W. Bush], and to
the country, by casting a cloud upon what he [Bush] claims to be the
legitimacy of his election."
Apparently, denying the
presidency to Al Gore, the guy who actually won the most votes in
Florida, did not constitute "irreparable harm" to Scalia or the media.
And
apparently it wasn't important that Scalia’s son worked for the law
firm that was defending George W. Bush before the high court (thus no
Scalia recusal).
Just like it wasn't important to
mention that Justice Clarence Thomas's wife worked on the Bush
transition team and was busy accepting resumes from people who would
serve in the Bush White House if her husband stopped the recount in
Florida...which he did. (No Thomas recusal, either.)
And
more than a year after the election - a consortium of newspapers
including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today did
their own recount in Florida - manually counting every vote in a process
that took almost a year - and concluded that Al Gore did indeed win the
presidency in 2000.
“If
all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards
and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore
would have won.”
That little bit of info was slipped
into the seventeenth paragraph of the Times story on purpose so that it
would attract as little attention as possible around the nation.
Why?
because the 9/11 attacks had just happened - and journalists feared
that burdening Americans with the plain truth that George W. Bush
actually lost the election would further hurt a nation that was already
in crisis.
And none of that even considered that Bush
could only have gotten as close to Gore as he did because his brother,
Florida Governor Jeb Bush, had ordered his Secretary of State, Kathrine
Harris, to
purge at least 57,000 mostly-Black voters from the state’s rolls just before the election.
So
for the third time in 4 decades - Republicans took the White House
under illegitimate electoral circumstances. Even President Carter was
shocked by the brazenness of that one.
And Jeb Bush and the GOP were never held to account for that crime against democracy.
Most recently, in 2016, Kris Kobach and Republican Secretaries of State across the nation used
Interstate Crosscheck
to purge millions of legitimate voters – most people of color – from
the voting rolls just in time for the Clinton/Trump election.
Millions
of otherwise valid American voters were denied their right to vote
because they didn’t own the requisite ID – a modern-day poll-tax that’s
spread across every Republican state with any consequential black,
elderly, urban, or college-student population (all groups less likely to
have a passport or drivers’ license).
Donald Trump still lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, but came to power through an electoral college designed to
keep slavery safe in colonial America.
You
can only wonder how much better off America would be if 6 Republican
Presidents hadn't stolen or inherited a stolen White House.
In fact - the last legitimate Republican President - Dwight Eisenhower - was unlike any other Republican president since.
He ran for the White House on a platform of peace - that he would end the Korean War.
This from one of his TV campaign ads:
“The
nation, haunted by the stalemate in Korea, looks to Eisenhower.
Eisenhower knows how to deal with the Russians. He has met Europe
leaders, has got them working with us. Elect the number one man for the
number one job of our time. November 4th vote for peace. Vote for
Eisenhower.”
Ike
was a moderate Republican who stood up for working people - who kept
tax rates on the rich at 91 percent - and made sure that the middle
class in America was protected by FDR's New Deal policies.
As he told his brother Edgar in 1954 in a letter:
"Should
any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment
insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not
hear of that party again in our political history."
And
Eisenhower was right - the only way Republicans have been able to win
the presidency since he left office in 1961 has been by outright
treason, a criminal fraud involving conflicted members of the Supreme
Court, or by being vice-president under an already-illegitimate
president.
And that's where we are today, dealing with
the aftermath of all these Republican crimes and six illegitimate
Republican presidents stacking the Supreme Court and the federal
judiciary.
And this doesn’t even begin to tell the story of how the Republican majority in the senate represents 36 million
fewer
Americans than do the Democrats. Or how in most elections in past
decades, Democrats have gotten more votes for the House of
Representatives, but Republicans have controlled it because of
gerrymandering.
This raises serious questions about the legitimacy of the modern Republican Party itself.
They
work hand-in-glove with a group of right-wing billionaires and
billionaire-owned or dominated media outlets like Fox and “conservative”
TV and radio outlets across the nation, along with a very well-funded
network of right wing websites.
The Koch Network’s
various groups, for example, have more money, more offices, and more
staff than the Republican Party itself. Three times more employees and
twice the budget,
in fact. Which raises the question: which is the dog, and which is the tail?
Whether
it’s ending trade deals, bringing home jobs, protecting Social Security
and Medicaid, or saving our public lands and environment – virtually
every promise that Trump ran and won
on is being broken. Meanwhile, the oligarchs continue to
pressure Republican senators to vote their way.
Meanwhile, a public trust that has taken 240 years to build is
being destroyed,
as public lands, regulatory agencies, and our courts are handed off to
oligarchs and transnational corporations to exploit or destroy.
The Trump and Republican campaign of 2016, Americans are now discovering, was nearly all lies, well-supported by a
vast right-wing media machine
and a timid, profit-obsessed “mainstream” corporate media. Meanwhile,
it seemed that all the Democrats could say was, “The children are
watching!”
Fraud, treason, and lies have worked well for the GOP for half a century.
Thus,
the Democrats are right to now fine-tune their message to the people.
But in addition to “A Better Deal,” they may want to consider adding to
their agenda a solid RICO investigation into the GOP and the oligarchs
who fund it.
It’s way past time to stop the now-routine
Republican practice of using treason, lies, and crime to gain and hold
political power.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and author of over 25 books in print.
