Behold the poll watcher: A rootin', tootin' odyssey in voting, vigilance & vitriol

In 1944, at the height of sustained Allied efforts driving back fascist forces once intent on conquering the world, the U.S. government produced a short film, “Tuesday in November,” focused on voting as the bedrock of American democracy. It began with polling-place officials of different political persuasions gathering early one morning in a vacant school classroom on a peaceful California home front – a campus principal, a streetcar employee and a housewife: “They’ve all known one another for years,” the narrator tells us. “First they remove the last traces of their campaign activities – their party buttons. Then they take the oath. This makes them responsible for seeing that the voting here today takes place according to the laws of the land. And now the polls are open.” First voter: the town milkman, pausing briefly amidst his neighborhood rounds.

This homespun scene, unfolding to the strains of composer Virgil Thomson’s best Americana, is inspiring in that wonderfully naïve and idealistic way Americans like to see themselves. Released in 1945 by the Office of War Information, the 17-minute film was screened overseas, primarily in towns and cities recently liberated by the Allies, as an example of democracy in action, complete with respect for founding American principles, tradition and one another. Yet for too much of our history, this scene has been illusionary; in 1944 alone, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled political parties in Texas (in short, the Texas Democratic Party; Republicans were practically extinct in Texas) could not decide on their own who could vote in their state primaries and who couldn’t – a ruling that sought to end the state’s repeated efforts to keep minority voters out of the polling place. State and federal laws, for good or ill, have made the polling place an increasingly complicated venue. And now legislators of the dominating party in Texas – this time the Republicans – are about to aggravate matters in ways arguably targeting that proverbial principal, streetcar employee and housewife by empowering a figure not seen in the 1944 film but certainly part of the American electoral scene in one form or another since our nation’s early days. Behold the poll watcher.

Texas Senate Bill 7, which supporters describe as an omnibus “election integrity” bill and critics more accurately label a “monster voter restriction bill,” will represent many different rights or restrictions to many different people if passed in present form and signed into law. Chief among them: empowerment of partisan poll watchers, expanding their right to be “near enough to see and hear” election goings-on and stiffening penalties for election officials who dare restrain poll-watcher activities in election venues.

Key problem: Poll watchers in Texas may lack the rigorous training required of polling-place workers regarding election law and polling-place protocols – and, worse still, the bill sets no penalties for poll watchers who overstep their authority and disrupt voting. And such disruptions are a strong possibility. Despite East Texas Republican Sen. Bryan Hughes’ insistence that poll watchers are the “eyes and ears of the public,” the truth is they’re first and foremost the partisan eyes and ears of political candidates and party officials. And given the depths to which politicians and their acolytes often sink, clashes can and will result – and, in fact, already have under present state law, including here in McLennan County.

Don’t misunderstand. Some poll watchers I know take great pride in not only the discipline they demonstrate in heeding state laws governing polling-place activities but the citizenship they exemplify in objectively overseeing elections in McLennan County. Yet even they will acknowledge the existence of those poll watchers who let personal passions for particular candidates or animus for the opposition foul the very democratic nest of our republic. And the prospect of poll watchers being permitted to record suspicious activities – primarily inappropriate or illegal assistance to voters – as provided in legislation now under consideration worries some lawmakers, election workers and voting rights champions, given the supposed sanctity of the polling place. Some fear cell-phone videos could be downloaded on social-media platforms such as YouTube, embarrassing innocent voters. As amended (and with full approval of Sen. Hughes, the bill’s author), SB 7 would outlaw such downloading – a reassuring step if it survives the rest of the rough-and-tumble legislative process. As Senate Bill 7 stands now, a poll-watcher video could only be shared with the Texas Secretary of State’s Office if a polling-place violation is claimed.

Root of the problem

“This could get lost in the discussion, but at the risk of stating the obvious, poll watchers represent multiple political parties,” Hughes stressed of provisions invigorating poll watchers in SB 7, co-authored by our own Republican state Sen. Brian Birdwell. “There are poll watchers from the Democratic Party, there are poll watchers from the Republican Party. These poll watchers are the stand-ins for the public. They’re there to make sure the rules are followed, and it’s important they be able to do their jobs.”

The biggest problem in all this comes from the hostility that politicians themselves whip up among citizenry, including those who might subsequently sign up to be poll watchers with an axe to wield. For instance, during the tumultuous 2020 general election, our own Sen. Birdwell got up at a church in nearby Bellmead and questioned love of country by Americans allied with the Democratic presidential ticket. Yet, as co-author of Senate Bill 7, he would have us believe those Republicans who took him seriously in church and then sign up as poll watchers won’t enter the polling place with venomous biases and intent. (For the record, at this same Oct. 25 Faith & Freedom Coalition prayer and political rally at Church of the Open Door, Sen. Hughes spent his turn at the lectern preaching an old-time sermon in miniature about the importance of obtaining citizenship in heaven “because our good works are not enough.”) Factor in President Trump’s groundless and odious allegations of malfeasance by rank-and-file election officials, despite the fact his own attorney general and his own Department of Justice investigators and prosecutors found no significant evidence of such malfeasance, and you have a potent prescription for trouble when at least some partisan poll watchers enter the scene so neatly and so properly portrayed in 1944.

Similar provisions empowering poll watchers can be found in other legislation percolating in the Texas Legislature, including House Bill 6, a similar omnibus voting bill co-authored by our own Republican state Rep. Charles “Doc” Anderson. HB 6 declares that the poll watcher is instrumental in ensuring the “purity of the ballot box” and that an election official commits a Class B misdemeanor if “the officer intentionally or knowingly refuses to accept a watcher for service.” (One skeptical legislator wondered aloud how one might refuse a poll watcher for service any other way but “intentionally or knowingly.”)

Proposals to further empower and shield poll watchers raise their involvement to the very top of concerns in state election legislation that would also ban the drive-through voting and expanded early voting hours that minority voters in particular enjoyed in congested, pandemic-hobbled Harris County in the 2020 general election. Notwithstanding the fact these county-ordered measures broadening voting seem like great ideas in any proud, self-respecting democracy, they’re admittedly not provided for by state law. And now state law will specifically prohibit them. There’s also a highly questionable degree of meddlesome micromanaging regarding local distribution and placement of voting machines proposed that could mean longer lines for some voters and needless county expense. On the other hand, a toxic provision requiring that disabled citizens furnish documentation proving they’re truly disabled – which critics correctly cited as a de facto poll tax – was removed from Senate Bill 7 before its passage in the upper chamber, though even this could reappear before the Legislature as a whole is finished. Advocates for disabled Texas voters must remain vigilant.

One can understand why a poll watcher might become frustrated under ordinary balloting conditions. State law allows poll watchers to observe almost every aspect of the voting process but the voter’s actual voting. However, state law also forbids them from talking to election workers except to report a suspected violation. And they’re strictly forbidden from conversing or communicating with voters. They’re also forbidden from leaving the polling place without the election judge’s permission unless the poll watcher has worked five consecutive hours.

Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School who specializes in election law, put it best in a ProPublica interview last year: “If you’re waiting for the busloads of fraud to arise, and what you get is small American-flag-waving democracy, you begin to go out of your head. It’s like sitting in a field waiting for the UFOs and the UFOs never show up. And then you’re just sitting in a field, which is fine for a couple hours, but polls are open about 15 hours a day.” And for those poll watchers who suspect the worst by the enemy at the cost of favorites on the ballot, the temptation is to claim skullduggery is afoot and you need more latitude to do your job and catch villainy red-handed. And if your party is in power but increasingly anxious about changing demographics and tightening victory margins every two years, the inclination is to alter voting dynamics in ways that favor your party, not the casual, often unsuspecting voter. Before long, few will be sure what’s legal and what’s not anymore, let alone whether the sky is falling.

Allegations galore!

The situation becomes more volatile when race differences bubble up, as I happened upon as Waco Tribune-Herald opinion editor in 2018 at a polling place in a predominantly black neighborhood of Waco (and on the former campus of a historic black college). Swirling charges and counter-charges of impropriety embroiled the mostly white supporters of a white Republican county commissioner candidate and the mostly black supporters of a black Democratic county commissioner candidate. The candidates vied to succeed McLennan County Commissioner Lester Gibson, a deeply revered figure in Waco’s African-American community. Formal complaints of wrongdoing were lodged against each of the two election judges at the Waco Multi-Purpose Community Center. The Republican commissioner candidate's wife alleged the African-American Democratic presiding election judge was swaying voters to vote Democratic, though five sworn written statements from witnesses claimed otherwise. And no less than the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund accused the white Republican alternate election judge of balking at helping voters cast straight-ticket ballots for Democratic candidates “because it bothered her when individuals supported U.S. Representative Beto O'Rourke over U.S. Senator Ted Cruz.” (Footnote: The extremely tight O’Rourke-Cruz contest represented that year’s flashpoint election across Texas, causing many Republicans to contemptuously huff and puff and dismiss the charming Democratic candidate’s Portuguese-Spanish first name as a politically inspired affectation, though my trusted friend, distinguished Texas journalist Carlos Sanchez, an El Paso native like O’Rourke, insists the nickname was given to O’Rourke in his youth by his family. The baseless criticism astounds given that foreign-born Republican Ted Cruz’s first name is Rafael, not Ted.)

African-American election judge Anita Phillips later credited poll watchers for much of the furor at the Waco Multi-Purpose Community Center, "making voters feel uncomfortable and intimidated as they voted, both curbside and inside the vote center. Candidates and poll watchers acted outside their scope to intimidate staff and attempt to intimidate me. My vehicle and license plate were aired on the news as unfounded accusations of voter fraud were reported (and) left me questioning the safety of my family and myself.” White Republican Party Chairman Jon Ker blamed Phillips while acknowledging others acted improperly: "There were accusations back and forth, and there were things that went on that, frankly, if not illegal were highly inappropriate. Electioneering was allowed within the 100-foot limit [of the polling place]. People were talking with voters. A couple of women came in and shot a video and put it on Facebook. Anita Phillips was the election judge.” White McLennan County Democratic Party Chairwoman Mary Duty concurred about overall election dynamics, even as she consistently backed Phillips as blameless in the confusion: “The election in November became very heated. There were a lot of accusations flying both directions. We did our due diligence, took sworn statements from our people and forwarded them to the Secretary of State's Office.” My take from a survey of the busy scene amidst finger-pointing: lots of questionable activity and indignity by all involved, including partisans backing both commissioner candidates. Claims and counter-claims continued simmering well after the 2018 general election before the McLennan County Commissioners Court all the way to the Texas Secretary of State’s Office and, in 2021, the State Capitol.

Nor are countywide, statewide and national races necessary to bring out the worst at the polling place. In a May 2019 municipal election, a poll watcher began hollering and accusing the alternate election judge in Bellmead of changing votes at a computer, then threatened the judge with legal action. At some point, the presiding judge exercised the right given by state law to election judges: Police were summoned. Ironically, this clash involved County Commissioner Lester Gibson’s son Travis, an African-American candidate for the Bellmead City Council, and the white poll watcher tapped by Gibson’s white opponent. County Elections Administrator Kathy Van Wolfe acknowledged the problem in a January 2020 interview conducted by Trib Editor Steve Boggs and me: “Well, we do have a very, very zealous poll watcher in Bellmead and it's the same person for every election, every time they have one. There are laws that govern what they can and can't do. The problem with that is the election judges are just trying to conduct the election. The poll watcher would like to be able to tell the judges what to do and they all want to call and complain.”

Such incidents explain the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund’s opposition to measures in the Texas Legislature further empowering poll watchers. “This bill appears to transfer authority for the safety and integrity of elections to partisan poll watchers, including by preventing an election judge from removing a watcher from a polling place for any reason other than for an offense related to election fraud, which could encourage voter intimidation,” the civil rights organization and law firm stated in a March 25 letter specifically opposing House Bill 6 but just as relevant concerning other bills. “HB 6 also repeatedly uses the phrase ‘purity of the ballot box’ to justify its aim of emboldening partisan watchers. Comparable language regarding the ‘purity of the ballot box’ that is found in the Texas Constitution has deep ties to calls by white legislators in the state to ensure the ‘purity of the Anglo-Saxon race’ by, among other tactics, disenfranchising black Texans. The discretion HB 6 affords partisan operatives, particularly in a state with a long and well-documented history of official and unofficial discrimination against black and Latino voters under the guise of ‘purity,’ creates a substantial risk of operating to intimidate and disproportionately disenfranchise voters of color.”

Three days earlier the civil rights organization took aim at SB 7: “Election administration should not be partisan, yet SB 7 deputizes political operatives with cameras, empowering them to freely harass and intimidate voters. Although Texas law places limitations on who can serve as a poll watcher – requiring that poll watchers be appointed by either a candidate for office, a political party or a proponent or opponent of a ballot measure – SB 7 deputizes and empowers these political operatives to roam freely and record voters in polling locations, which gives them the ability, if not the right, to engage in voter intimidation. SB 7 specifically eliminates Texas’ previous restrictions on watchers recording voters in polling locations, providing opportunities for watchers to target and harass voters using their images from the polling locations.”

Some of the local controversy spilled over into the House Elections Committee’s 20-hour April Fool’s Day hearing on Chairman Briscoe Cain’s somewhat disjointed HB 6. Linda Jann Lewis, the NAACP Waco chapter’s political action chair also affiliated with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, testified of years of harassment by Republican poll watchers targeting the African-American election judge presiding over the one and only early voting location in the heart of Waco’s African-American community: “Approximately six years ago, there were problems at this early voting location and she did what the [state] election code required. She called the police and had a candidate removed, a Republican candidate removed, because he refused and defied her. He was inside the polling place, shaking hands and soliciting voters. As a result of that, there has been an all-out war on McLennan County’s only presiding African-American election judge. We have had in Waco, Texas, in McLennan County, what we call ‘poll watcher overseer syndrome.’” (The word “overseer,” of course, refers to the often cruel managers of plantation slaves in the antebellum South.) Lewis went on to detail harassment of election workers by Republican-dispatched poll watchers, including one who reportedly dogged an election worker into a break area to watch while the election worker took medication. In parting, Lewis warned partisan aggression was discouraging ordinary election workers – many over age 60 – from enlisting for further duty in the line of fire. “Baby boomers – we are the people who run the elections,” she said. “Don’t send us to jail because a poll watcher says they think we did something wrong.”

Over in the Senate, Sen. John Whitmire, a white Harris County Democrat regarded as the dean of that chamber by virtue of his 38 years there, added to such allegations during debate with Sen. Hughes on SB 7, noting Republicans typically place poll watchers in sites where they expect to lose votes, if only to disrupt the process. “In my experience, in the fall [elections],” he said tersely, “there are more poll watchers in minority communities than there are in the general community at large. Take my word for it.” Gracious to a fault, Sen. Hughes said he had never seen or heard evidence of this racial targeting by Republican poll watchers, candidates and party officials. (To his credit, Hughes managed committee hearings and floor debate on Senate Bill 7 with patience, professionalism and grace, unlike boyish House Elections Committee Chairman Cain who at one point abruptly ended a hearing on his own bill after refusing to allow questions about it from visiting Rep. Nicole Collier, chairwoman of the Texas Legislative Black Caucus. Cain’s apparently bungled procedural move not only highlighted House Speaker Dade Phelan’s exceedingly poor judgment in appointing Cain to chair the committee but effectively sidelined hundreds of Texans who traveled to the State Capitol to testify on HB 6, some in favor of his legislation.) Sen. Whitmire’s argument about the GOP targeting minority strongholds was bolstered days later when a leaked video showed a Harris County Republican Party official enlisting poll watchers to stop “voter fraud” in primarily black and brown neighborhoods.

Who's the alpha here?

Obviously, strong feelings dominate the matter. During House Elections Committee testimony on March 18, Angela Smith, founder of the Fredericksburg Tea Party and a poll watcher through three election cycles, acknowledged that "election judges definitely in our area do believe I am adversarial," though she denied she is. She refuted the prediction by Texas Civil Rights Project senior attorney James Slattery that newly empowered poll watchers would create more disturbances in polling places and election venues sufficient to impede voting or the tallying of votes. "Poll watchers such as myself at Central Count [where votes are tabulated at evening's end] usually arrive around 7 in the morning, and I have left as late as 3 in the morning," Smith said. "This is not an easy job and I take offense when I am demonized as someone who is trying to slow the process or get in the way of any of the election officials. I do not believe this is a partisan issue. I think it is very much bipartisan. I think my friends on both sides of the aisle would agree with that." Other poll watchers offered similar testimony with specific allegations of wrongdoing they had witnessed. “I might just point out that efficiency and processing voters is critical, but so is accuracy,” Tea Party Patriots of Eastland County founding member Ruth York told committee members. “Inaccuracy could disenfranchise someone who is eligible to vote. Unlike some of you here, we don’t get to change our vote if our machine malfunctions or whatever.” However, some battle-hardened election officials predicted that further empowering partisan poll watchers would only unsettle matters for earnest election workers.

“A great majority of our election judges and clerks are really good people who give up a whole lot – the whole day for little pay – to make democracy work,” said David Griggs of Dallas, who has served as an election judge or alternate judge in some 65 elections over 27 years. “Personally, I would never kick out a poll watcher without law enforcement help. They’re there and they have a right to be there. But judges need the authority to maintain control of the vote center, just like a judge would to maintain control and order in the courtroom. This bill opens the door for a disruptive poll watcher to push the envelope and then criminalizes the simple exercise of authority by the election judge to handle it. And with regard to the video provisions of this bill, it allows the poll watchers of their own volition to decide to use a video on their phone to record something. We tell our voters not to use their cell phones, yet we’re going to give poll watchers carte blanche to pull out their phones? I mean, what are voters going to think about this?”

Harold Huff, a former research engineer for the Texas A&M University System and poll worker now living in Terlingua in West Texas' rugged Big Bend region, at one point rose to defend election workers who, given the conspiratorial frame of mind obviously driving some of this Republican legislation, appear suspect in intention and deed. "One thing my grandmother said many, many years ago is that our democracy in the state of Texas is defended by the blue-haired ladies of the polling place," he told state senators, including Birdwell. "It's still defended by those blue-haired ladies. Those are the people who are being discussed as some kind of evil government employees bound to shift our elections wrong. They wouldn't do it on a bet. These are honorable people, strong and caring people, and yet many pieces of legislation including this bill [SB 7] set up criminal penalties and tend to criminalize them ahead of the case, simply by setting these ridiculous requirements. They have to maintain control of their polling places. And the poll watchers are not educated, they're not taught, they're not trained, they don't take oaths that are meaningful in any way. None of this legislation addresses penalties for poll watchers misbehaving. The people running the elections at all levels are attempting to do their very best to have the fairest elections we can have. Poll watchers are there for a fixed interest of one kind or another. And it may be the Democratic Party, it may be the Republican Party. They can be the Proud Boys or the Ku Klux Klan. Any of them are eligible to be a poll watcher."

Even those supporting Republican-crafted election reforms have raised concerns about poll watchers. In voicing her support of House Bill 6, Chambers County Clerk Heather Hawthorne stressed the absolute importance of poll-watcher education. “I hate there’s this myth that seems to be hanging in the air that poll watchers have a chip on their shoulder or they’re evil or that nobody wants to be watched,” she told House members. “I think that is not true. The problem with a lot of poll watchers is they’re sent by a candidate, like you and I, and we just say, ‘Please go watch and see what happens.’ They’re not trained. They really don’t understand the election process.” One poll watcher, who testified that she has worked also as an election judge, backed the bill’s provisions on poll watchers but agreed education is needed for watchers and even polling-place workers. Another who has served as a poll worker since retirement in 2016 offered his solution: inserting the Secretary of State’s handbook on poll-watching straight into the state election code. “Once you’ve done that – because it tells them they can’t talk to a voter, it tells them about going outside for the telephone, it says what they can’t and what they can do – I think if you put that in there, you’ll solve your problem.”

During debate with Sen. Hughes, longtime Democratic Sen. Royce West – a towering African-American attorney whose grandfather reportedly witnessed the infamous 1921 Tulsa race massacre – pointedly questioned the lack of state-regimented training for poll watchers, especially with the video component now being added to the electoral arena. At one point, Hughes dismissed the idea of such training for poll watchers given that few enough poll watchers step forward for duty and that training might further discourage their numbers – an interesting bit of logic, given that polling-place workers and election judges are also increasingly difficult to find because of stiffening penalties for innocent mistakes and stupefying complications added to election law every two years.

“What’s going to end up happening, senator, is that you’re going to have an election worker and you’re going to have a poll watcher who are frankly going to push each other,” West told Hughes. “I think what we’re going to end up seeing are disputes that may turn violent if this becomes law between poll watchers and election administrators. They’re going to be testing each other to figure out who is the alpha in that situation.”

The final irony somehow barely casting a shadow on all this “election integrity” legislation, including poll watchers: precious little evidence of election fraud in Texas. To quote Keith Ingram of the Texas Secretary of State's Office on the 2020 elections: “In spite of all the circumstances, Texas had an election that was smooth and secure. Texans can be justifiably proud of the hard work and creativity shown by local county election officials. I am happy to report Texas elections are in good shape.” Of course, the Texas Secretary of State’s Office works closely with local election officials; state legislators do not.

Son of Big Lie!

Poll watchers who pursue their duties with restraint, discernment and integrity may take umbrage at allegations questioning their noble calling. They shouldn’t. Their resentment should be directed at those among their ranks who approach these honorable citizen tasks with overt partisanship and intentional mischief as their overriding goals and may soon be inspired to commit more deception and more anarchy at the polls. Certainly the question of irresponsible partisan watchdogs prompted a defining moment on the Senate floor when Democratic Sen. Sarah Eckhardt asked SB 7’s author whether he would favor inclusion of non-partisan poll watchers – a question that caught Hughes off guard. His answer is telling: “Hadn’t even thought about it. Sure, I think we should talk about it. I really hadn’t thought about it.”

One can concede video evidence shot by earnest poll watchers – especially avowedly non-partisan poll watchers such as, say, the League of Women Voters of Texas – might sort out allegations and counter-allegations concerning partisan conspiracies and poll-worker competence and integrity. Unfortunately, many Republicans view even the league with suspicion because, while the nonprofit steers clear of endorsing candidates and most ballot issues, it actively encourages voting rights – now anathema to the state and national GOP. (The league’s simply stated mission: “Empowering voters. Defending democracy.”) Certainly non-partisan poll-watching might have added clarity to the allegations so plentiful at the Waco Multi-Purpose Community Center back in 2018. Yet even this recourse will suffer in credibility the first time a doctored and misleading video is uploaded to YouTube in defiance of state law or is dispatched to the Texas Secretary of State’s Office and revealed to be fraudulent or deceptive. In acknowledging how polarizing our times are and how misinformation dominates elections today, Sen. Eckhardt even raised the idea of requiring election workers to wear body cameras, much as many law enforcement officers do, to help prove or disprove allegations of wrongdoing. Whatever else, the proposal suggests that, for all the calls for election integrity in the Texas Legislature and other legislatures across our country, the polling place in America is becoming a war zone, not a crucible of democracy.

For the casual voter briefly visiting the polling place, potential encounters with emboldened partisan poll watchers and other “election integrity“ measures concocted by state legislators this season may represent inconvenience at least, annoyance at most. But for those graying citizens who out of quiet, unshowy, genuine patriotism staff our polling places and facilitate the election of those very same legislators, election duty may seem more and more like combat duty, especially with aggressive poll watchers unleashed on them. I’m reminded of my friend David Gray, a local Democratic Party activist to be sure but, during his duties as an election clerk, a straight-shooting citizen bowing first to the increasingly threatened concept of democracy in America, not the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, David very publicly abandoned his polling-place duties in 2015.

“I acknowledge that candidates have the right to have poll watchers, but in today’s system they’re a complete waste of time,” he wrote in a column for me expressing his frustration. “If they want a candidate elected – and that seems to be the ultimate concern – they should be out getting people to the polls and not standing around the polling places trying to intimidate the voters and clerks. The woman in our midst Saturday was unpleasant, readily accusing everyone of dishonesty all day. I personally believe that if you do not believe fellow citizens can be trusted, it very likely says something about your own trustworthiness. But whatever your belief, you do not have the right to bully anyone anywhere at any time for any reason — particularly at a polling place on Election Day.” Toward the end of the column, he recounted his breaking point: “Toward the end of the day, I finally let the situation get the best of me, and I said things to one of the two women making allegations about the election staff that I should not have said. I let her pull me down to her level — which was very low to start with — and that’s why I will work for this system no more. I simply will not let mean-spirited people like these two women make me a part of the problem.”

Nearly six years have passed since David wrote that column and we’ve seen little abatement of the problem. A few days before my retirement from the Tribune-Herald last November, I discussed my interest in serving as a poll worker with McLennan County Elections Administrator Kathy Van Wolfe, herself just weeks from retirement. Since then, I’ve reconsidered. I’m not particularly bothered by the fact that COVID-19 variants are now spreading, threatening some repeat of the pandemic conditions that made voting so perilous in 2020. I am bothered by Republican lawmakers tripping over themselves to draft and pass legislation targeting election workers. Such pursuits represent a cowardly, knee-jerk reaction by a corrupt party beholden to a corrupt former president and “the Big Lie” that soothes his king-sized ego and reassures deluded disciples and dupes that the votes were always on his side of the disputed election ledger. A few more stormy election cycles must now pass involving election workers, voters and what a Republican Party official enthusiastically described as an “election integrity brigade” overwhelming and disrupting polling places, possibly with the very same twisted, pent-up impulses that led to the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Only after further confrontations, some testy, some possibly violent, will someone in the Statehouse file legislation mandating rigorous training, restrictions and somber oaths for poll watchers and stiff penalties when they get out of line – penalties just as stiff as those now threatening embattled election workers.

Strap on your guns!

Perhaps weary, beleaguered election officials should welcome House Bill 530, which would codify in law Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s non-binding 2018 ruling. To quote the Texas Secretary of State’s subsequent interpretation, “a presiding judge [who] possesses a handgun license is permitted to carry a handgun while serving as an election judge on Election Day in limited circumstances.” The ruling draws from a Texas Court of Criminal Appeals 1913 decision, according to Paxton’s ruling: “That court concluded that because a presiding election judge had the same power as a district judge to enforce order and keep the peace, and because a district judge could carry arms to a polling location, the presiding election judge likewise had authority to do so.” During a March 18 Texas House Homeland Security and Public Safety Committee hearing, proponents of HB 530 repeatedly stressed that the right to go armed in the polling place should go beyond the bill at hand and be extended to alternate election judges and clerks, and expanded to include early voting as well as Election Day. One imagines this might serve to restrain and discourage unruly poll watchers who have yet to secure the right to go armed into election venues with anything more than attitudes and recording devices.

“It is difficult for me to ask for more [polling-place] volunteers, especially female volunteers, elderly or disabled volunteers, and ask them to disarm in order to serve the community in remote parts of the county,” said Smith County Republican Women spokeswoman Dee Chambless, who has served as both a poll worker and poll watcher and will be certified to serve as an election judge next election. “I gave up my gun in order to serve. I did so but I didn’t like it. And let’s be honest: The reason why is because there’s a lot of emotion in this [last] election and volunteers were essentially in a gun-free zone for the day because you couldn’t have a gun in the polling place. So I was not able to defend myself if I needed to and I think it’s unfair to ask our volunteers to do so.” Harris County resident Alexie Swirsky, who has worked various duties in elections over the past four years (and wore a black Gun Owners of America “Victory or Death: No Compromise” T-shirt at the committee hearing), said the one time a heated confrontation arose in the polling place in her presence, police didn’t arrive for 45 minutes by which time the dispute had cooled. And too often police don’t understand election law sufficiently to settle matters anyway, she said. “If the police need to be involved,” she said, “I as election judge want them to be able to read the law and easily understand the true meaning of it, so the election can be conducted in proper fashion.”

All this left Democratic state Rep. Rhetta Bowers aghast after recent history: “I just have to say: 2020 was a different kind of election year. I myself did have to call police to a polling-place location, and have been at polling locations where the police did have to be called, and I just don’t know with the divisiveness of the country and sometimes our state if it’s a good idea to have guns at polling locations.” Houston resident John Robert Behrman, retired from a career that included tenure at Houston’s Manned Spacecraft Center and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, offered articulate pushback on HB 530: “We may be at the point where unobtrusive and systematic enforcement of existing law is more effective than grandstanding with new laws or other forms of security theater. In particular, I have serious reservation about this bill, which has blossomed – namely, the author of this bill, the attorney general, keeps talking about election judges. There are two kinds of election judges. There’s the presiding judge unless the presiding judge is not there, in which case the alternate judge is presiding, and they are drawn from two different adversarial parties. Introducing guns into that environment strikes me as an arms race. All the election workers there are to protect the voters. You’re not there to protect yourself, you’re there to protect the voters. You take that oath. And it’s labor-intensive work. You have very little ability to be hypervigilant like somebody assigned to [stand guard] at a military installation. You have no situational awareness. These [voters] are right here, and you’re having to pay attention to them individually. You’re in no position to make good defensive use of a pistol.”

Some proposals for compromise were raised, such as ensuring concealed-carry-only protocols prevail; greater involvement by county sheriffs in safeguarding polling places (possibly putting to real work some of those sheriff’s posses usually reserved for parades and little else); and, ironically, the idea of instead arming poll watchers because, Behrman said, “they just sit there in a well-run precinct being bored to tears.” In any case, the committee approved the bill pretty much without any news coverage, sending it on to the full House by a 7-2 vote, only for subsequent House passage of another bill scrapping licenses and training requirements to carry handguns in Texas promising more apprehension and more volatility in the polling place assuming the Senate passes all this legislation. Stay tuned.

Amidst all this, we can but hope for something of the atmosphere that McLennan County Democratic Party chairwoman, former classroom teacher and pizza restauranteur Mary Duty suggested for the serious, mindful business of voting in a Feb. 22, 2020, Tribune-Herald column: “The polling place should be as quiet as a library on the eve before final exams. Silence creates a space where people can think and take their time on balloting choices – and longer times are more likely in general elections now that voters can no longer vote straight-ticket with the push of a button (hardly a problem in primary elections). People who disrupt, speak to voters, editorialize on candidates, curse or use racial slurs should be asked to leave.”

You may now remove your masks – but don’t

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's decision to lift his statewide mask mandate and most other public health restrictions imposed to battle spread of COVID-19 has spurred what most controversial decisions do. Because it defies common sense and lacks sufficient explanation, confounding even faithful, everyday Republicans here in conservative McLennan County, it has fueled plenty of speculation about his ulterior motives. And that’s rarely a good thing.

One wave of speculation bets that Abbott is less concerned with public health – he reportedly didn’t consult three of his four medical experts before announcing his decision, nor has he gathered in many moons his handpicked Strike Force to Open Texas to advise him. This speculation holds that he’s far more concerned about his political prospects, both presidential in 2024 (assuming former President Trump doesn’t run) and gubernatorial in 2022. Running for president might be easier if one is governor. Of course, that’s assuming he can get past his role in leaving Texans without power and water for days during the recent devastating winter storm.

Consider Abbott’s point of view: Science-scoffing Republican South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis emerged from last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference with high approval ratings, bolstering any run for higher office. And in Texas, Republican Party of Texas chairman Allen West has for months successfully whipped up Republican resentment against Abbott for his public health measures. Both West and equally colorful Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller appear to be jockeying to challenge Abbott in 2022. And Republican state legislators are now debating how to curtail Abbott’s executive powers.

Solution, at least as Abbott might see it: Lift public health measures just as the Biden administration is ramping up delivery of vaccines to ensure more Americans can get vaccinated sooner. Catch: When not even 10 percent of our state’s population has gotten fully vaccinated, lifting restrictions now strikes rational Texans as another case of the state and federal governments working at cross-purposes.

Other speculation runs darker: The Republican governor supposedly wants to make the Democratic Biden administration look bad despite its aggressively addressing the COVID-19 pandemic in ways the previous administration did not. One way to do so: undermining Biden administration efforts and letting everyone in Texas shed his or her mask in public in the name of economic recovery and individual liberty. The spike in disease can then be blamed on Biden. In short, unleash the online memes. Set loose the talk-radio demi-gods.

Yet it’s always dangerous to assume what motives lurk in the heart of an individual, even a politician – and that’s assuming a politician these days even comes equipped with a heart. So let’s instead judge the governor by his words and deeds, including his remarks lifting the mask mandate in Texas and increasing capacity of all businesses and facilities in the state to 100 percent, meaning more of us in the workplace and places of business, either as employees or customers. (This latest executive order goes into effect today.)

"We must now do more to restore livelihoods and normalcy for Texans by opening Texas 100 percent,” Abbott said. “Make no mistake, COVID-19 has not disappeared, but it is clear from the recoveries, vaccinations, reduced hospitalizations and safe practices Texans are using that state mandates are no longer needed. Today's announcement does not abandon safe practices that Texans have mastered over the past year. Instead, it is a reminder that each person has a role to play in their own personal safety and the safety of others.”

In a perfect vacuum, this makes sense. And clearly the governor is stressing Texans “not abandon safe practices.” Yet one reason Abbott has seen himself labeled “King Abbott” and “tyrannical” by fellow Republicans is that some are concerned about their own individual liberties and pursuit of happiness with no concern whatsoever for the welfare of others in our society. And unfortunately, many of these crazies control critical levers of power in today’s Republican Party of Texas.

Yet for all the brickbats lobbed his way by Chairman West and a handful of carnival barkers in the Texas Legislature, Abbott now foolishly risks giving up the modest credit many of us – Republican, Democrat and independent alike – have lent him in this year-long struggle by surrendering the battle just as vaccine supplies are increased. Defying political logic, Abbott forsakes hard-earned constituent goodwill and trust.

The Texas Restaurant Association, one of the most influential pro-business groups in Texas, quietly applauded the governor’s move but also made clear its anxieties, advising that all restaurant employees continue wearing face coverings when working and that they pass health screenings before each shift. It also recommends social distancing when seating parties. Many restaurants are complying with such advice. They know that unless people feel confident about dining in, many customers will stay away.

Same goes for any business, something Waco native Austan Goolsbee, Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, stressed in a Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago interview last July, back when many of us still looked desperately for science to produce vaccines: “I always say, ‘The virus is the boss,’ which means the most important thing you can do for the economy is to slow the rate of spread of the virus. So policymakers have got to take every action they can to slow the rate of spread of the virus. The irony is that you don’t need the vaccine in order to do that. Places like Taiwan, Korea, Australia and New Zealand got control of the virus through public health measures and they’re basically back (to pre-pandemic economic levels). I wish we could put a direct focus on the public health aspect.”

Certainly, Dr. Jackson Griggs, who more than anyone in McLennan County has become the public face of medical science, research and common sense in this pandemic, put his best face forward on the governor’s March 2 announcement: "While I am very optimistic that COVID-19 case fatality rates will decrease as vaccination rates climb, it is important to remember that the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] still recommends masking any time you are not with members of your own household. Wearing a face covering remains a crucial community-wide practice to slow spread among friends, family and colleagues. If you are in a closed space with non-household members, I strongly encourage the consistent use [of] masking for the safety and health of all."

And consider the hair-raising scene in a waiting room at a local hospital in conservative Central Texas last Thursday afternoon when one patient in conversation with others suddenly blurted out, “Gov. Abbott is trying to kill us all!” The others agreed. A nurse marveling at the conversation before her expressed relief that at least the H-E-B grocery stores so prevalent in the Waco area still require masks of their customers – except that wasn’t quite so. In the wake of the governor’s announcement, H-E-B said masks would be strongly encouraged of customers but no longer mandated. Then it clarified its policy, issuing this statement: “We will continue to expect shoppers to wear masks while in our stores. H-E-B has always been a strong proponent and advocate of mask use even before mandates and orders were passed.” Clear as mud.

The change in tactics invites us to reflect deeply on past COVID-19 victims and the possibility of more such victims, especially when so many Texans defiantly march to Lt. Col. West’s fife-and-drum tune about liberty and continue politicizing mask mandates, travel advisories, physical distancing and vaccines. A graying acquaintance of mine boldly announced she refused to allow the deadly virus to change her life — and so continued her dizzying round of leisurely activities and travel involving everything from casinos to beaches through the very worst of the pandemic. And, of course, the virus did change her life. Her dutiful, soft-spoken husband recently died of COVID-19, robbing her not only of her lifelong companion but the mindful custodian of their financial affairs and a significant livelihood to fund her joyous pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.

The very day Abbott's executive order lifting the mandate went into effect, alert Waco Tribune-Herald readers also considered the rich, charitable life of one of our community's latest COVID-19 victims, 76-year-old Susan Lamb, a Texas native who spent 40 years teaching and supporting special education students, including in Waco Independent School District and at the Waco-based Methodist Children's Home. In retirement, she traveled to China to minister and teach English. She became a teacher and mentor to incarcerated youth in Brownwood. To quote her obituary further: "There was never a cat in need that she didn't shower with love and provide with food and shelter. She was committed to helping others, and during her retirement she volunteered for Meals on Wheels, taught piano to adults and shared her love of Christ by teaching Sunday school at Columbus Avenue Baptist Church. Her last words showed her strong commitment to her faith and desire to see her [late] husband and parents [with] her final words to family being: ‘I got something to do and somewhere to go.’" She died of COVID-19 two days before the mask mandate was lifted by the governor.

Which raises a relevant question: Will lifting the mask mandate at this critical juncture truly safeguard Texans and others moving forward? As popular scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson noted last week about Abbott's decision and similar decisions in other states: "To abolish mask-wearing laws in some states while the rest of the nation keeps theirs is like designating a peeing section in a swimming pool."

If this were the wartime equivalent President Trump sometimes talked about in 2020, not only would Gov. Abbott’s courage on his particular field of battle be justifiably questioned with last week’s executive order, so would his sanity as a responsible leader. Whether you like President Biden or not, the cavalry is on the horizon. The bugle is blowing. It’s no time to send up the white flag when Texas can sacrifice and struggle a few months more and edge closer and closer to that cherished herd immunity that most folks – even Republicans – agree will significantly safeguard us.

A week ago my wife and I got our second Moderna shots at Baylor University’s McLane Stadium. (We got our first shots at the city convention center in downtown Waco.) I cannot stress how deeply impressed I was with this wonderfully organized, efficient and cordial collaboration between city-county public health officials, Baylor Scott & White staffers, Baylor University and an army of friendly, patient volunteers. The open-air process at McLane took less than a half-hour and we never even had to leave the comfort of our car.

City officials tell me the only thing holding back accelerating such efforts into hyper-drive is the supply of vaccine.

“We have told the state [that] our public health district can receive and distribute significantly more vaccines – up to 10,000 a week – but we’re still only getting 1,500,” Waco Mayor Dillon Meek told me. “Further, we have extensively advocated for additional vaccines. We’ve called and sent written letters discussing our need to every level of higher leadership. We also developed a Waco Strategic Vaccination Procurement Taskforce, composed of public health workers, lobbyists, health care experts and government leaders to ensure we’re presenting the right data to get more vaccines to Waco.”

In short, once again that government closest to the people is working most aggressively to obtain herd immunity in our region. Meanwhile, state government is arguably mixing public welfare with political motives and machinations.

By standing strong on the mask mandate imposed last summer, Gov. Abbott gave much-needed political cover to countless mayors and county judges (including Meek, his mayoral predecessor Kyle Deaver and McLennan County Judge Scott Felton) whenever the complainers among us griped and whined about the discomfort of masks and suppressed liberties and such. Local leaders, so often vilified by state lawmakers, could in this one crisis explain that, whatever else, the mandate was issued by the governor and that all of us must try to abide for everyone’s sake. For once, it seemed, most of us were on the same page.

Even friends of mine with whom I seldom agree on politics have expressed surprise in the governor’s about-face in all this. And while they aren’t necessarily trying to deduce the governor’s motives for abruptly dropping our collective guard, they’ve also made clear they personally don’t plan on changing their daily routines of precaution and vigilance. They’re going to keep masking up, staying properly distanced and limiting travel, especially with potentially insidious viral variants increasingly prevalent.

Maybe questioning Abbott’s ulterior motives isn’t fair, but then he didn’t exactly help matters when, in response to President Biden’s criticizing the lifting of mask mandates as “Neanderthal thinking,” the governor charged the Biden administration has been “releasing immigrants in South Texas that have been exposing Texans to COVID.”

As my former Tribune-Herald opinion page colleague, veteran newswoman Sandra Sanchez, stressed in her Tuesday account about Abbott for Border Report, the situation involving immigrants and COVID-19 is somewhat complicated, involves multiple agencies and initiatives and, yes, leaves plenty of room for finger-pointing at both the Biden and Abbott administrations. To his credit, Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, took the high ground during Abbott’s sputtering press conference in Mission Tuesday, stressing specific solutions in the context of a robust state-federal collaboration; Abbott by contrast spent more time inflaming matters, likely further indication of what’s actually on his mind these days.

Just for the sake of argument, let’s assume for a moment the undocumented immigrants being released into Texas society are indeed COVID-ridden, every single one of them, rather than, say, a small percentage: What’s the smartest course of action Texans can pursue to protect themselves short of driving into the Rio Grande anyone who simply looks like an immigrant? How about masking up and staying physically distanced a few months more till more and more of us have up to 95 percent protection against being infected by immigrants or anyone else close by, including all those Republicans who loudly refuse to mask up or physically distance or get COVID-19 vaccinations?

In the end, Abbott is clearly rolling the dice not just on his political fortunes but on the chance that lifting the mask mandate won’t prompt another surge in hospitalizations and death, even as viral variants threaten to complicate matters in terms of spread and lethality. The irony? Regardless of what you think of Abbott’s words and deeds of late, we all have an interest in seeing to his success in this reckless and self-serving gambit, given that the ones who might pay the greatest price otherwise are our friends, neighbors and loved ones.

In short, keep masking up – and when in public, avoid the unmasked like the plague. They might be just that.

Governor eyes flanks, grabs gun

"Normalcy returning, Abbott assures Texans" read the headline over a Page One story in one of Texas’ major dailies about Gov. Greg Abbott's State of the State address last week. A mighty big "if" lurks behind that bold headline if Abbott refers to the hospitalizations, deaths and politicization marking Texas Republicans' handling of the coronavirus, complete with inter-party fights in and out of court in 2020 over Abbott's eminently sensible mask mandate and halfway reasonable steps to lessen the possibility of people contracting COVID-19 while voting in person.

While the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court sided sufficiently with Abbott in resolving such matters whenever differences sprouted as legal challenges, some on the far right nonetheless began referring to him as "King Abbott" for his gubernatorial declarations during the unfolding crisis. The two-term governor has seen his name and actions linked to tyranny.

Which brings us to what's likely behind the governor’s disappointing, all-too-familiar, rabble-rousing God-and-guns State of the State address, brimming with ambiguities and undisguised partisan pandering: For the first time, Texas' most popular Republican is staring at possibly formidable re-election challenges on both his right and left. At the moment, he’s clearly more worried about his right flank.

Leading in criticism of the governor as well as in actually filing lawsuits against him is former Army Lt. Col. Allen West, the carpet-bagging, secession-raising, one-term Florida congressman now only months into his new post chairing the Republican Party of Texas. Some of you may well remember Col. West. Last spring he led a rally in Austin protesting, among other pandemic public safety measures, the wearing of facial coverings or masks. Hours later he got banged up in an accident on his motorcycle on Interstate 35 in McLennan County and wound up in Baylor Scott & White Medical Center in Waco where a bunch of doctors and nurses wearing facial coverings for his personal safety stitched him back together.

Given that Col. West's attacks have been directed at Abbott as much as Democrats — including a failed lawsuit protesting Abbott's expansion of early voting by six measly days (on the grounds that only the Legislature can pursue such actions, even in a deadly pandemic) — some political observers have concluded West is laying the foundation for a primary election challenge to Abbott’s seeking a third term. Part of the strategy seems to be making Abbott look like President Obama, governing by executive decree (notwithstanding the fact this was also President Trump's style of governance as well). Only last week Col. West endorsed state legislation by Republican state Rep. Kyle Biedermann allowing state residents to vote on whether to secede from the United States. Supporters label this unconstitutional effort "Texit" after a very dissimilar effort by the United Kingdom to withdraw from the European Union.

If that’s not enough to keep Abbott awake nights, Texas’ most popular Democrat, former congressman Beto O'Rourke of El Paso, has voiced notions of running for governor in 2022. During a radio interview last month, O’Rourke suggested no other state has suffered from failures to address the pandemic to the degree Texas has, and that Abbott is ultimately responsible. "I want to make sure we have someone in the highest office in our state who’s going to make sure that all of us are OK,” the charismatic West Texan said. “And especially those communities that so often don’t get the resources or attention or the help, like El Paso.”

All of this helps explain Abbott’s State of the State address listing his priorities for the Texas Legislature, itself still trying to figure out the business of governing in a pandemic. (If you watched recent redistricting hearings, you know the problems both legislators and the public have with ZOOM technology.) The governor’s address threw plenty of red meat to ravenous Texas Republicans, obviously to discourage any primary election challenge from the far right: passing a state law penalizing cities that “defund” police departments (yet minus any mention of the reforms Abbott promised a grieving family in the wake of former Texan George Floyd’s shocking May 25, 2020, death by cop); creating a “sanctuary state” for gun rights (whatever that means); blocking governmental entities from shutting down churches or other religious activities; and taking steps to ensure “election integrity.” For the uninformed, “election integrity” in Republicanese translates to “voter suppression,” the go-to recourse when party activists and politicians refuse to change policy stances to accommodate the broader public and would rather just make it harder for some of us to vote. Such laws might help Abbott if O’Rourke runs for governor, given the latter’s stunning grassroots support during his strong 2018 run against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. Abbott’s tip of the hat to gun rights is no doubt a reminder that, in the wake of a massacre specifically targeting Hispanics in El Paso in summer 2019, O’Rourke angrily suggested outlawing private ownership of assault weapons.

Given the streak of anti-democratic ideology increasingly infecting the Republican Party of Texas, voters who subscribe to the notion of a democratic republic should worry about bills that would make it more difficult for everyday voters to cast ballots in Texas or penalize for simple mistakes rank-and-file election workers who must navigate complicated state election laws (plus endure some pretty indignant voters and poll watchers on occasion). Voting is supposed to be a right, not a privilege, and when the state of Texas makes a constitutional right harder to pursue (and in the absence of any significant evidence of election fraud), it’s clear such measures aim at one thing: preserving and defending not the U.S. Constitution but anxious Republican lawmakers and governors whose views are more and more rancid and out of touch with constituents. Those who hold to the rallying cry of widespread election fraud in President Trump’s 2020 defeat need to actually read the dozens of court opinions in which jurists Democratic and Republican — some even Trump appointees — found such claims sorely wanting to the point of obvious fabrication. Yet Republican state Rep. Briscoe Cain, who less than three months ago helped the Trump campaign press a desperate lawsuit to throw out millions of Pennsylvanians’ votes, has now been elevated to chair the Texas House Elections Committee. For the record, the federal judge who dismissed the lawsuit as “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations” is no boot-licking, Democratic toad; he’s a former Pennsylvania Republican Party official and a member of the rigorously conservative Federalist Society. To quote U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann in his ruling regarding this frivolous, Cain-assisted lawsuit: “In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state. Our people, laws and institutions demand more.”

As for the pandemic, Abbott remains in a tough spot. The Trump administration that Abbott dutifully supported deceived both the public and incoming Biden administration regarding vaccine reserves. Result: For all the governor’s organizational abilities during this crisis, the pandemic-pummeled state of Texas is now faced with trying to reach herd immunity of at least 70 percent when there’s a shortage of vaccine available nationwide. And till we reach herd immunity and more of us feel safe going into businesses and eating in restaurants, trying to energize the economic sector will remain a steep challenge. To make matters worse, more transmissible and possibly deadly variants of SARS-CoV-2 are on the loose, likely to exacerbate death tolls and hospitalizations that only now are beginning to decline. (And to hear local public health officials last week, the likely reason for this decline is that we've now passed the period of lingering consequences from large swaths of the public traveling and gathering for the holidays.)

With Lt. Col. West nipping at his political heels and threatening any dream Abbott might have of higher office; with Democratic President Joe Biden now scoring higher approval ratings in Texas than even Abbott (by two whole points in a University of Houston Hobby School of Public Affairs poll); with Abbott’s reluctance to pursue the wild-eyed, science-denying course of Republican governors in South Dakota and Florida while shamelessly pandering in other ways to unbalanced gun enthusiasts and Old Testament thumpers, the governor of Texas is increasingly showing signs of wanting to have his cake and eat it too. Abbott's setting the course for the Texas Legislature — complete with the claim that “the government is coming to get your guns” — shows he has decided against leading a badly divided, fast-decaying Republican Party out of the swamp of QAnon conspiracy theories and stolen elections and secessionist tendencies. Sadly, this means during the 87th legislative session fixes to problems that don’t exist and indifference to problems that do.

So much for American exceptionalism

As a retired journalist pondering impressions of American carnage in recent years, some impressions prompt more reflection than others. Among them: an encounter in August 2017 in the wake of deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, involving white supremacists, KKK disciples and neo-Nazis protesting removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. This clash over escalating racism and old memorials to the heroism of Confederate leaders dotting town squares across the American South prompted me to visit Waco's historic Oakwood Cemetery to ponder the towering statue marking the remains of iron-willed Texas Gov. Richard Coke. I wanted to see how that monument acknowledged his military service in the cause of the Confederacy.

I arrived at Gov. Coke's imposing memorial at the same time an aging couple from neighboring Bell County did. They were there to visit the grave of Texas governor and Baylor University president Pat Neff, to whom they were related. But the man – his sympathies clearly conveyed by his "Make America Great Again" cap — wanted to first take photos of the statues of Gov. Coke and other former Confederates before they were "desecrated." As we talked, he said he feared the nation was headed for another civil war. We discussed how this might play out, given that divisions today seem more rural/urban in nature than North/South. At one point, I said I regretted that President Obama, for all his obvious powers of oratory and intellect, had not brought Americans together — and that the current occupant of the White House most certainly had not.

"Oh, c'mon," the old gentleman erupted. "He's only been in there six months! Give the man a chance!"

I've long remembered this response — common from Trump supporters at the time — because it acknowledged that, for all his claims to the contrary, real estate promoter and reality-TV star Donald Trump was not ready for primetime when he narrowly won the presidency in November 2016. He didn’t even cut it as an earnest, dutiful apprentice. On the campaign trail, he fumbled basic knowledge about not only the Constitution, which a president swears to preserve, protect and defend, but the Bible, which should have been a warning sign to all the white evangelicals who nonetheless flocked to him in what one could argue constituted the biggest display of mass blasphemy in American history. His knowledge of pressing issues seemed drawn from New York Post headlines and peeling bumper stickers, not policy papers and think tanks. And, besides, how much experience in the Oval Office, let alone in life, does a 70-year-old business entrepreneur so confident of his own abilities need to calm and reassure a divided and confused nation?

Sadly, when he had a chance to do otherwise after Charlottesville, President Trump only aggravated matters, famously equating racists and civils right demonstrators as “very fine people.” In terms of preparedness, one by now must question whether Trump was ever fit for duty as an American leader, whether he ever fully appreciated the checks and balances inserted into the Constitution by the Founders; whether he ever fully understood that the art of the deal — at least in politics — involves both sides walking away with something; whether he ever fully understood that governing is more than holding campaign rallies appealing to your adoring base while alienating others you ironically might need to get re-elected, let alone improve and unify the country on your watch; whether he ever fully understood that Americans — at least some Americans — look to their presidents to demonstrate integrity, discipline, inspiration and strength, to be the adult in the room, not the child disposed to temper tantrums, rants and lies. The irony amid the tumult and bloodshed of Charlottesville: Many Trump supporters, in letters to the Waco Tribune-Herald that I published as opinion editor that spring and summer, stressed we should put our differences aside and rally behind this man. But did he rally and unite us when it mattered?

Even now, I hear crestfallen Trump supporters say the mainstream news media never gave him a chance. First off, that’s not our job. Second, in both 2016 and 2020 he ran for a job where the bar is set high, not low, and great things are expected, especially from someone who boasts unendingly of his greatness.

As a seasoned political observer, I've long believed a president determines the overall success or failure of his administration in the first six months. Republican President George W. Bush's team early on bungled its handling of Republican Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont over legitimate tax-cut differences, pivoting on whether federal budget surpluses generated in the late 1990s should be used to fund steep tax cuts (the Bush administration position) or paying down the national debt (Jeffords’ stance). The Bush White House unnecessarily poisoned relations by, among other miscalculations, stupidly snubbing Jeffords from a National Teacher of the Year award ceremony at the White House honoring a Vermont high school educator, despite Jefford's prominence in education issues. For this and other White House slights, Jeffords reportedly fumed and switched political parties, tipping the Senate to Democratic control — an utterly avoidable development. This happened at least partially because a too-full-of-itself Bush administration demonstrated immaturity and lack of judgment and foresight about one of its very own party members. Is it any wonder this administration then failed so spectacularly to fully grasp the volatile and intricately interwoven religious and sectional differences it needlessly aggravated by invading Iraq in 2003? 

President Obama demonstrated a similarly tone-deaf approach early on. Only a month after his 2009 inauguration on the theme of hope and change, during a White House fiscal summit, the Democratic president huddled with Republican lawmakers. Congressman Joe Barton of Texas, acknowledging that Democrats ran both chambers on Capitol Hill, humbly asked the president to persuade Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to include Republicans in the decision-making process. Obama’s response was disappointingly aloof and non-committal. Result: Obama’s signature domestic achievement, the 2010 Affordable Care Act, passed without Republican input or even a single Republican vote. Similarly, the economic stimulus bill of 2009 passed with no Republican votes in the House and only three in the Senate. And Republicans paid back Obama’s indifference when they gained control of Congress. As Barton said at the time to the president, “I think the House Republicans have shown that, when we’re not included in the decision-making, we’re disinclined to sign off on the solution.”

One wonders what the Obama administration might have been capable of over eight long years had it demonstrated more inclusiveness when this golden opportunity presented itself. Instead, the president — confronted with Republican obstruction later in his tenure — eventually retreated into policy by executive order.

In going through papers and periodicals to sort out what to keep and what to toss the other day, I came across a copy of Time magazine's 2016 Person of the Year issue, headlined "Donald Trump: President of the Divided States of America," complete with a color portrait of a stern president-elect seated in an ornate chair and leaning to one side to look over his shoulder into the camera. Editor Nancy Gibbs' introductory "Behind the Scenes" column — illustrated with a photograph of Trump during the Nov. 28 photo shoot at the president-elect's residence at Trump Tower — is written in what I would describe as an optimistic, even celebratory tone:

"Four years ago it was Barack Obama, fresh off his re-election; this time, Donald Trump, who spoke with Obama the night before our cover shoot. There’s a unique bond between presidents and their successors, and Trump talked about the surprising chemistry he felt with Obama both when they met at the White House two days after the election and in their conversations since. As [photographer] Nadav [Kander] and his team set up lights and equipment in the Trump Tower penthouse, the president-elect looked at Nadav's portfolio, particularly his striking 2013 portrait of Prince Charles that was taken for a Time cover. In the hours that followed, Nadav photographed Vice President-elect Mike Pence, incoming chief of staff Reince Priebus, senior counselor Steve Bannon and campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, whose portraits accompany Michael Scherer's profile."

A few pages later, the magazine chronicled 2016 in quotes, beginning with Candidate Trump's comment on the fealty of supporters in January: "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters." There was President Obama's insistence in April that political considerations would not affect the federal investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server as secretary of state: "Nobody is above the law." And, yes, there was Trump's boastful, boys-will-be-boys, “locker-room” remark about his sexual hold over women from a leaked 2005 video that Americans heard for the first time in October 2016, weeks before Election Day: "Grab them by the pussy." And the cavalcade of quotes from the famous, infamous and obscure came to an end with an upbeat quote from Obama at the December White House Christmas tree lighting: "After eight years as your president, I still believe there is so much more that unites us than divides us."

In her own essay further into the issue, Gibbs captures the moment of Trump's presidency in waiting:

"For those who believe this is all for the better, Trump's victory represents a long-overdue rebuke to an entrenched and arrogant governing class; for those who see it as for the worse, the destruction extends to cherished norms of civility and discourse, a politics poisoned by vile streams of racism, sexism, nativism. To his believers, he delivers change — broad, deep, historic change, not modest measures doled out in Dixie cups; to his detractors, he inspires fear both for what he may do and what may be done in his name. The revolution he stirred feels fully American, with its echoes of populists past, of Andrew Jackson and Huey Long and, at its most sinister, Joe McCarthy and Charles Coughlin. Trump's assault on truth and logic, far from hurting him, made him stronger. His appeal — part hope, part snarl — dissolved party lines and dispatched the two reigning dynasties of U.S. politics. Yet his victory mirrors the ascent of nationalists across the world, from Britain to the Philippines, and taps forces far more powerful than one man's message."

And there's a brief essay by American historian Jon Meacham for those (including Trump) who argued Trumpian parallels with President Andrew Jackson, with the Jackson biographer noting Old Hickory’s rise from the ranks of the common people rather than from a realm of wealth, privilege and entitlement. Meacham, however, worried about another seeming difference, given Trump’s scandalous behavior on the campaign trail in 2015 and 2016:

"There is, however, an essential difference, one that will tell us much about the coming years in U.S. life and politics. For all his bombast, Jackson was an experienced public figure — he had served as a judge, a senator and a general — who understood his weaknesses and took care to compensate for them. He could thunder and storm; he was prone to fits of rage and temper. Yet he was self-aware, and with that came a kind of self-restraint. He was, as [a] visitor to the Hermitage noted, as at home with a chessboard as he was with charging blindly forward. We simply don't yet know whether Trump possesses the kind of discipline that Jackson brought to the presidency. Jackson's character and worldview reflected a genuine conviction in the ultimate wisdom of the people. He was no opportunist. He came to his populism not as a political device but as a result of his experience."

I found this Time "Person of the Year" issue illuminating: First, its tone was realistic but open-minded, fair. The page devoted to quotes offered critical context involving Trump and the world around him. Journalism is nothing without context, and democracy is nothing without reliable, relevant, accurate information and critical, balanced, scene-setting context. Gibbs' thoughtful essay honestly highlighted the hopes and fears a Trump presidency roused in different Americans, offering the balance so many Trump supporters often wrongly insist is missing in mainstream news media coverage. Meacham's essay provided historical assessments on what populism looks like when genuine, mindful, informed and coming direct from the people, not channeled through Trump Tower prisms. One could well argue that not only many in the news media but many in society were open to the promise and potential of a Trump administration, even if some of us were understandably guarded. For weeks ahead of inauguration some of us were lulled into optimism that Ivanka Trump might temper her father’s rasher pronouncements, particularly regarding social issues and the environment. A friend of mine — a Muslim, if it’s relevant — who served in the military abroad as well as at the Pentagon assured me the republic was safe so long as retired Marine Corps Gen. Jim Mattis, revered in military circles, arguably one of the best-read scholars to serve in uniform, was part of the Trump administration as secretary of defense. (Some of Mattis’ recommended reading: Ulysses S. Grant’s “Memoirs,” H.R. McMaster’s “Dereliction of Duty,” Robert Gates’ “Duty,” Nelson Mandela’s “Long Walk to Freedom,” Viscount Slim’s “Defeat Into Victory” and, one of my favorites, Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations.”) Even I reassured wary friends and anxious readers that, whatever else, veteran Republican lawmakers who swore to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States” and valued their reputations in society and history more than that of this renegade in the party would surely keep President Trump on a tight leash, safeguarding the country from his worst excesses and impulses, restraining him through their Article I powers and possibly even rendering him a serviceable president in the final analysis.

The problem is Trump not only showed less and less inclination to heed well-informed advisers and well-intentioned, tempering influences, he also never gave as good as he very often got. Certainly, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton showed far more respect for Trump than he showed her during the 2016 campaign, encouraging mob chants of "Lock her up" to packed auditoriums — the sort of thing one might expect of a totalitarian government that locks up its political opponents. Clinton nonetheless magnanimously conceded defeat within hours of Election Night. Even though she won the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, she understood and accepted the controversial system of how we pick our presidents and she bowed to that system, even if her supporters lamented and groused about the Electoral College. What's more, President Obama invited President-elect Trump to the White House right after the election, even though Trump spent years trying to delegitimize Obama as foreign-born and possibly Muslim and thus not a U.S. citizen. Again, Obama showed far more respect for Trump than Trump showed for Obama. Indeed, Trump’s pre-presidential impulsiveness and vilification and lies previewed what soon engulfed the White House: the audacious victimhood and personal grievance he claimed throughout his tenure alongside the bullying brand of demagogy he deployed against enemies real and imagined, complete with more lies, more conspiracy theories, more falsehoods.

Indeed, no sooner was the Jan. 20, 2017, Trump inauguration over than he was whining about news media estimates supposedly lowballing his inaugural crowd size. And so off we were on a wild, four-year ride well beyond any of the early stumbles and pratfalls of his predecessors. Off we were with a strutting, narcissistic, dishonest president who, unlike Jackson and other presidents, showed little to no interest in serious policy beyond what his considerable gut told him, who had little to no interest in building consensus or demonstrating his own "Art of the Deal" in working with earnest legislators. Early on we were treated to Muslim travel bans; censorship of the Environmental Protection Agency; repeated labeling of the inquiring and justifiably skeptical press as "the enemy of the American people"; terming what the press knew to be lies as merely "alternative facts"; allegations of some 3 million illegal votes in the 2016 presidential election (conveniently explaining away Hillary Clinton's popular vote margin); attacks on the flagging star power of Trump's successor on "The Apprentice" (muscleman and movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger); a federal judge's suggestion that Trump might well have incited violence against protesters during a 2016 campaign rally in Kentucky; elimination of ethics training for incoming White House staffers; and Trump's reference to constitutional checks and balances between the executive and legislative branches as "archaic" and in need of revision. By midsummer 2017, many Americans had seen enough chaos and impetuosity in the Trump administration to realize the adjective "unprecedented" would be invoked regularly over the remaining three and a half years. Many wondered, more seriously, if constitutional guardrails on their own would allow the republic to survive, given that many Republican lawmakers seemed more subservient to Trump's whims and wishes than their supposedly sacred oaths of office. How they might look in the history books mattered far less than being targeted by one of President Trump's stinging tweets, wielded like Jovian thunderbolts from on high to the delight of followers who admired his direct and unvarnished communication.

Judging from a 2020 election tally that involved many independents and many former Republicans, a lot of us who voted against him had a particular line in the sand that Trump crossed during his four years in power: For me, it was his caging of desperate migrant mothers and children in what appeared to be kennels, sometimes in squalid conditions, and his separating of migrant parents from their children, a policy executed so effectively and so cruelly that, even under subsequent court orders, the administration’s incompetence and utter disregard for human life are such that many migrant families still can't be reunited. Another line crossed for me was Trump’s contempt for the Constitution, which he violated by hijacking powers of the purse specifically reserved and relegated to Congress by Article I — and all to fund construction of a border wall that he long claimed Mexico would fund. His haughty insistence, too, that he was above the law is truly the stuff of Old World monarchies and corrupt dictatorships and papal states — not a 21^st century democracy in which every man and woman, high or low, is supposed to abide by rule of law.

For me, Trump’s efforts to enlist foreign agents and leaders, including our adversaries, to help him win elections in America is beyond question. I’ve read the entire Mueller Report, and while evidence of concerted and strategic collusion with Russia to win the 2016 election is indeed sketchy, there’s absolutely no doubting Citizen Trump’s bumbling efforts to entertain such possibilities, including a June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower. And a fair reading of the White House’s own transcript of the president’s July 25, 2019, phone conversation with the newly elected president of Ukraine makes plain to all with eyes to see and brains to deduce that President Trump clearly sought to employ foreign resources for his gain in the 2020 presidential election (and, worse, by using a congressionally approved, taxpayer-funded $391 million aid package to Ukraine as his leverage). His use of pardon powers have absolved and freed from punishment everyone from corrupt political allies (including a Republican congressman who spent campaign funds on extramarital affairs, then had the gall to blame his wife for campaign finance violations) to U.S. mercenaries convicted in the 2007 mass slaughter of Iraqi civilians (and who worked for the brother of Trump’s education secretary). These and other Trump pardons prove once and for all that Trump’s vow to drain “the swamp” was meant only for those entrenched who showed no fealty to him; indeed, he didn’t drain the swamp, he restocked it. And his squeezing divisive political motives and bizarre conspiracy theories out of public safety measures painstakingly designed by his own administration to save American lives during a pandemic ought to condemn this president to a deep circle of everlasting COVID-19 hell. He did plenty of damage, not only contributing to more hospitalizations and more deaths than we might have seen under a competent administration free of conflicting aims but devastating the U.S. economy far more than was necessary. In doing so, Trump ironically lost his one ace in the 2020 re-election cards. Granted, a pandemic of the present scope would have tested any American president, but Trump’s decision to needlessly exacerbate matters makes President Woodrow Wilson’s general neglect of the 1918 pandemic look positively benign, especially given Wilson’s focus on World War I and its aftermath.

Possibly to his credit, Trump also showed Americans for the fickle, gullible and treacherous lot many of us really are. He revealed during his campaign and presidential tenure how some of us simply veer toward destruction and anarchy if our constitutional framework and traditions of self-governance don’t favor or pamper us sufficiently on a regular basis. In the final weeks of the 2016 campaign, a longtime friend of Waco Tribune-Herald Editor Steve Boggs explained her decision to vote for Trump: “I just want to burn it all down.” And electing Donald Trump seemed the best way to do so, ensuring America was effectively dismantled and then overhauled by someone who paid no heed to constitutional or political or societal niceties. Trump also revealed, time and again, our robust all-American hypocrisies, including Republicans’ abrupt dismissal of runaway deficit spending as a significant concern during Trump’s years in power, to the degree nearly $8 trillion has been added to our national debt during his four years in office. The issue received lip service at best from Trump and the GOP. As a Trump-supporting dentist responded in spring 2019 at Ridgewood Country Club after I raised the looming fiscal crisis and insisted such reckless spending was neither conservative nor Republican by any stretch of principle: “Let it ride!” Trump also revealed the fundamental xenophobia and racism and hatred lurking in some of our neighbors, co-workers, friends and family members. Tribune-Herald publisher Jim Wilson remarked that whatever malevolent impulses had been locked away in some of us for years had now been unleashed by Trump’s rhetoric, tweets and clear contempt for truth, decency and what only a few years earlier passed for traditional American values. The situation unfolding over the past five years, complete with once unimaginable political idolatry deifying Trump and far-fetched QAnon fabrications about devil-worshipping, cannibalistic Democrats, reminds me of that British science fiction movie from the 1960s, “Quatermass and the Pit,” in which genetic engineering conducted on early-day man by meddlesome Martian forces eons ago one day kicks in, transforming some human descendants into obedient, destructive and unquestioning agents on Earth, even as others among us somehow remain immune to these influences, free to resist and confound Martian skullduggery. If this analogy seems over the top, so is what I’ve witnessed, endured and resisted in recent years.

Given the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol by his supporters and the installing of troops to ensure an orderly (if not exactly peaceful) transfer of power to his successor, President Trump will go down in history as an intoxicating and malicious figure who for four years peddled lie after lie to his passionate followers, themselves either in sustained denial of truth or simply content to live under his powerful spell. He will go down in history as a president who for his own political purposes divided constituents during a plague to the point he leaves office with 400,000 dead fellow Americans and stunning revelations in just recent days that promised federal vaccine reserves don’t actually exist, complicating crisis management for his presidential successor as well as governors of states desperately trying to reach herd immunity of 70 percent before even more dangerously transmissible viral variants strike. He will go down in history as a president who in his final months in office whipped up conspiracy theories and falsehoods that his re-election had been “stolen” through massive election fraud, despite abundant evidence to the contrary scrutinized and adjudicated in courtroom after courtroom, state after state, and despite his otherwise dutiful attorney general’s estimation (after widespread Department of Justice investigations) that Trump’s allegations were “bullshit.” He will go down in history as a president who encouraged thousands of conspiracy-nourished supporters to march on the Capitol to halt the lawful tallying of Electoral College votes — rhetoric sufficient to incite some of these "patriots" to storm the building, sending his own vice president (threatened by the mob with hanging) and even supportive, seditious Republican lawmakers into hiding and resulting in the death of a police officer, reportedly beaten to death with a fire extinguisher. He will go down in history as the only president impeached twice, both times for conspiring to crookedly ensure his re-election — once by trying to sway a foreign government to aid him in serving up dirt on a Democratic opponent, once by using faithful stooges and willing lackeys to actively disrupt Congress in pursuit of its constitutional duties, an incendiary move that backfired on the president in ways that a wiser politician, even one of Machiavellian disciplines, would have surely anticipated. But then that’s the thing about Donald Trump — he just isn’t as smart as he thinks. And the fact his followers can’t see through him says something about their smarts. He’s all about immediate gains and gratification, not what might later explode in his face once the fuse burns down.

Up till Election Day, Trump and his supporters might have been able to argue for certain accomplishments such as the economy, even in defeat. However, in spreading misinformation and lies about election fraud (and with the full complicity of Waco’s newly elected congressman, Pete Sessions), in vigorously resisting and impeding the peaceful transfer of power established by not only the U.S. Constitution but American tradition (to the degree post-insurrection Washington, D.C., looked more like a war zone or military state, necessary to ensure his successor’s inauguration without assassination or further violence), Trump has earned sufficient infamy in future history books and American culture to stamp him as our worst president. Warren Harding and James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson have at last been eclipsed. One ultimate irony is that, even as Trump squirmed to free himself of all accountability in his final days, some of the rioters and insurrectionists of Jan. 6, 2021, were explaining to FBI agents and other law enforcement that, well, they only rallied in Washington and marched on the Capitol at the president’s behest.

As one who left the Republican Party as it surrendered all principles, all honor and all scruples (in other words, well before 2016), I have largely viewed the Trump administration with a dismay ricocheting between intense sadness and aching dread. Sadness in the sense that, like Time magazine editors four years ago, many of us actually wanted to see the new president succeed if his leadership somehow brought us together and bettered the nation, even if we hadn’t voted for him (and I sure didn’t). What a colossal opportunity lost for a man to do good that might have not only led his followers into closer union with the rest of us but perhaps done something to address the burdens of income inequality and health care that sideline so many struggling Americans. (For all his vows, Trump never even delivered a comprehensive health-care proposal.) Dread in the realization that this president demonstrated time and again he could not or would not learn from his failures, from citizen pushback, from perennially dismal popularity ratings. Instead, he corrupted not only an entire political party but way too many everyday Americans to the point of their no longer being able to tell right from wrong, to the point of their no longer assuming personal responsibility, to the point of their no longer understanding the principle of individual liberty alongside the Christian and communal concept of shared sacrifice and the public good. Trump led his party and his disciples into radicalization, delusion and madness, betraying everything from the U.S. Constitution to the Sermon on the Mount, everything from George Washington’s Farewell Address, to Webster’s Second Reply to Hayne, to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural, to Hamilton, Madison and Jay’s bedrock Federalist Papers, to FDR’s Four Freedoms to, for good measure, the Ten Commandments that so many of the Trump faithful pretend to cherish, even as they swore by “The Big Lie” to the very end. “American exceptionalism” — that uniqueness credited us by astute observers and political theorists ranging from Thomas Paine to Alexis de Tocqueville to Josef Stalin and signaling liberty, equality before the law and individual responsibility — no longer readily defines us. When tested, too many of us were willing to give it all up for the very sort of authoritarianism that extinguished so many budding democracies elsewhere in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Too many of us were ready to simply shelve democracy for four more years of Donald Trump, complete with loony hopes for and feverish dreams of martial law and divine intervention to save his presidency, right up till Inauguration Day 2021. Too many of us – some in Congress, some in the news media, some in state governments, some in law enforcement, some even in the military — were willing to overthrow an election and snuff out the will of the people. Today I better understand how the culture that gave the world Goethe and Humboldt and Beethoven and Schiller also gave us Hitler and Nazis and extermination camps and global conflagration. I know now it can happen here, certainly under a mesmerizing figure with more savvy, more calculation and more knowledge than some egotistical, uninformed, blundering charlatan who gained too much fame for our own good on NBC's "The Apprentice."   

After many of Trump’s supporters swarmed and occupied the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 (and in numbers that reportedly pleased crowd-obsessed Trump), my feelings of dread and melancholy and heartbreak turned to outright anger, vented not only at this president and his party for allowing this disgrace to happen but at the white supremacists, self-styled militias, patriotic thugs, closet subversives and gullible camp followers who smashed windows, battered doors, trashed offices, looted desks and hauled Trump and Confederate battle flags into what some of us regard as a cathedral of democracy. A U.S. flag was even employed to pummel a fallen police officer on the steps of the building. The Rubion has been crossed. Democracy has been assaulted, and not by all those socialists that Republicans have long warned would commit the dirty deed if allowed. In capping an administration that prided itself on keeping us out of further wars abroad, even as it weakened global alliances and coddled dictators and made the world less safe, Trump ironically and knowingly ignited war here at home, neatly living up to that 2016 Time magazine Person of the Year issue in ways so many journalists then could not have imagined: "Donald Trump: President of the Divided States of America." Showman that he is, Trump clearly saved his tumultuous best for the final act of his presidency. In the days after a successfully invigorated riot, he displayed no remorse, no personal responsibility. He continued to entertain darkly undemocratic thoughts, whipping up reality-TV suspense over whispers of martial law encouraged by everyone from former Army general-turned-foreign agent-turned-traitor Michael Flynn to radicalized pillow manufacturer Mike Lindell. This left just enough time to depart the presidential stage with a flood of additional pardons — tellingly, none at all for his army of faithful insurrectionists of Jan. 6, some by Jan. 20 pleading for such pardons to save them from convictions and prison sentences, but fittingly one for his shrewd political architect Steve Bannon, charged with fleecing other Trump loyalists by taking hundreds of thousands of dollars donated to Bannon’s “We Build the Wall” campaign, then using those donations for personal pleasures and pursuits. Roll credits. By all means, roll credits.