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.

Mr. Trump's antifa tea party

For two months now, one question has raged nationwide beyond the limits of common sense and hard facts: the question of allegations of massive voter fraud and election irregularities sufficient to steal victory from President Trump. Yet anyone who takes the time and initiative to read even some of the court rulings dismissing dozens of cases filed by the president and his allies, rulings involving more than 90 judges and justices in state and federal courts across the land, red states as well as blue states, will quickly notice two relevant themes.

First, many of these lawsuits (and I've read most in the comfort of retirement, free of the many obligations and duties of a daily newspaper opinion editor) simply don't offer specific evidence of fraud, probably because the attorneys know if they get caught lying to judges, the penalties can be severe and unforgiving. Only last week, in the 61st or 62nd or 63rd suit to be dismissed or pulled, this time for its "fundamental and obvious misreading of the Constitution," an outraged federal district judge openly contemplated pursuing disciplinary action against the attorney who filed it. The suit was so lacking in constitutional gravity that the attorney neglected to properly contact the intended targets (as required) or file the lawsuit in the correct court.

Second, those lawsuits that do offer specific allegations of election fraud don't withstand the scrutiny of the courts. Most of the evidence offers the consistency of a glistening soap bubble drifting lazily in mid-air. What’s more, a willfully ignorant segment of the public, in complete adoration of President Trump, simply can't imagine there are even more voters across America who feel very, very differently, that electoral intrigue and malfeasance must somehow be involved in his opponent’s victory. Surely all those packed, cheering rallies over the past five years are solid evidence of Trump’s hold over the hearts and minds of his countrymen.

Now a third reason arises justifying healthy skepticism about these allegations: the sloppily assembled PR campaigns mounted by desperate far-right cable TV commentators; crass, self-serving Republican lawmakers; and talk-radio rumormongers insisting that the pro-Trump combatants incited sufficiently to storm the U.S. Capitol by President Trump, Republican Congressman Mo Brooks, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and others were actually ... yep, you guessed it: devious and deceitful antifa terrorists disguised as MAGA warriors! By dawn's early light over our nation's capital last Thursday, Congressman Brooks was among those of the alt-right stumbling over the wreckage to blame rampaging leftists, tweeting to his followers: "Evidence, much public, surfacing that many Capitol assaulters were fascist ANTIFAs, not Trump supporters. Again, time will reveal truth. Don’t rush to judgment. Don’t be fooled by #FakeNewsMedia whose political judgment drives their reporting."

Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida was peddling this revisionist scenario from the floor of the House of Representatives last Wednesday evening, even as he was still trying to prop up fast-decaying Trumpian claims of election fraud that he and other Republican lawmakers (including Waco's newly minted congressman, Trump crony Pete Sessions) insisted on pressing, even while human excrement and broken glass and blood were still being cleaned up outside legislative chambers. Gaetz insisted “some of the people who breached the Capitol today were not Trump supporters. They were masquerading as Trump supporters and, in fact, were members of the violent terrorist group antifa.” In fact? Arizona Republican Congressman Paul Gosar, whose own siblings disowned him on the grounds of character and endorsed his opponent in 2018, tweeted just hours after the insurrection: “This has all the hallmarks of Antifa provocation.” Really?

Such claims compel questions. Given that the cheering demonstrators wearing red "Make America Great Again" gimme caps and waving blue Trump flags outside the White House earlier were responding to downright incendiary rhetoric from Brooks, Trump, tea party activist-turned-Trumpian warrior Amy Kremer, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and others, and given that these demonstrators then marched the 1.2 miles up to the U.S. Capitol, and given that this movement of 250,000 (if you believe President Trump's famously exaggerated crowd estimates; 8,000 was the figure news media used) was presumably in plain sight the entire time, how did antifa so thoroughly infiltrate their ranks? Did some of the Trump forces maybe duck down some alley on Pennsylvania Avenue, leaving those sly, sneaky antifa warriors to scramble into formation and then storm the Capitol? Or were those antifa warriors actually in the crowd outside the White House at the very outset, decked in MAGA hats all along and ironically quick to seize on the belligerence and resolve being preached from the stage? If you’ve witnessed the rally near the White House and the insurrection at the Capitol, you know better.

Yet everyday people I know are already rationalizing (with the aid of talk radio, Fox News and GOP hangers-on such as Sarah "Trump Lite" Palin) that the rioters who stormed the Capitol were antifa, not patriotic, law-and-order-loving Trump supporters. But as with allegations of voter fraud, evidence of dastardly antifa simply isn't there. The bare-chested, spear-carrying dude famously wearing horns on his head while leading others onward with rousing cries of “Hold the line, patriots!” and at one point standing at the desk from which Vice President Mike Pence fled? Jacob Anthony Chansley, AKA Jake Angeli, 32, a self-described "QAnon shaman" familiar throughout the Southwest for his support of President Trump and wild QAnon conspiracy theories. In a Jan. 8 "statement of fact" included among indictment papers, a Capitol Hill policeman adds this: "In addition, Chansley called in to the Washington Field Office of the FBI to voluntarily speak with law enforcement. Your affiant and an FBI agent spoke on the phone with Chansley who confirmed that he was the male in the face paint and headdress in the Vice President's chair in the Senate. Chansley stated that he came as part of a group effort with other 'patriots' from Arizona at the request of the president that all 'patriots' come to D.C. on January 6, 2021." A few days later the QAnon shaman was charged with violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds. And the guy who famously made himself at home in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office, putting his feet up on a desk and claiming, as a taxpayer, it was his desk anyway? Richard "Bigo" Barnett, 60, a right-wing braggart well-known to law enforcement and news media. His social media site stamps this Arkansan as a hardcore supporter of white nationalism and Trump. Among charges filed against him is that he unlawfully entered a restricted area with a lethal weapon — in this case, a stun gun. In an interview with news media at a Bentonville, Arkansas, "Stop the Steal" rally in November, he makes clear he believes Trump’s claims of voter fraud and that such things as mail-in-ballot misdeeds cost the president the 2020 election. Antifa? Really?

The list goes on and on. “The insurrectionist mob that showed up at the president’s behest and stormed the U.S. Capitol was overwhelmingly made up of longtime Trump supporters, including Republican Party officials, GOP political donors, far-right militants, white supremacists, members of the military and adherents of the QAnon myth that the government is secretly controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophile cannibals,” the Associated Press reported Tuesday. “Records show that some were heavily armed and included convicted criminals, such as a Florida man recently released from prison for attempted murder.” (The Associated Press reviewed social media posts, voter registrations, court files and other public records for more than 120 people by then either facing criminal charges related to the Jan. 6 unrest or who, going maskless amid the pandemic, were later identified through photographs and videos taken during the melee, often with the help of real American patriots.) What’s more, by late last week, counterterrorism experts who monitor anti-government skullduggery on social media say some of the insurrectionists laying siege to the Capitol a week ago are now furious that credit for their conquest is being hijacked and credited to antifa forces by right-wing media whose steady nourishment of such groups has presumably backfired on sponsors. More evidence? Well, consider the dead, including 55-year-old Alabama resident Kevin Greeson who, "in the midst of the excitement" (to quote his family), suffered a heart attack. On Parler, the social-media echo chamber where conspiracy nuts and white supremacists percolate, Greeson praised Proud Boys and attacked President-elect Joe Biden. In November, he sounded the alarm: "All males over the age of 18 join a group... be ready to defend our country!! Spend your money on guns and ammo... it's time to stop this shit!!!!!" Antifa? Really? (In the irony of ironies, Greeson's wife has dismissed the viral social-media claim that her husband died by accidentally tasing himself.)

Consider California swimming pool service owner Ashli Babbitt, 35, the debt-ridden Air Force veteran killed by Capitol Police while trying to crawl through the broken glass of a barricaded door and refusing to heed police commands to stop. On Facebook she vented over gun laws and immigrants and followed the tweets of retired Army Gen. Michael Flynn, who has encouraged President Trump to declare martial law and oversee military-run elections to replace those held by state governments. On the eve of the siege, Babbitt tweeted: "Nothing will stop us. They can try and try and try but the storm is here and it is descending upon DC in less than 24 hours….dark to light!" She served several deployments in her military tenure, reportedly including Iraq. She concluded her active duty as a security guard at Dyess Air Force Base in my old hometown of Abilene, Texas. By the time she got herself shot by police trying to take over the Capitol, she clearly had forgotten or dismissed the oath she took to the Constitution. Antifa? Really? Already anti-government forces have turned her into a martyr.

More? For weeks right-wing, anti-government websites touted "Operation Occupy the Capitol: Taking Back Our Country from the Corrupt Politicians," encouraging those of similar mindset to "go to Washington Jan. 6 and help storm the Capital." Antifa? Really? One website user declared: "We will storm the government buildings, kill cops, kill security guards, kill federal employees and agents and demand a recount.” Even now these groups online promise more insurgency and more chaos not only in Washington, D.C., but at state capitols in the days leading up to Inauguration Day. They warn against removal of Trump via the 25th Amendment. Meanwhile, some Texas Republicans such as indicted Attorney General Ken Paxton – who did his duty to help turn fired-up protesters into dutiful insurgents in Washington – now insist the insurrectionists are (to quote Paxton) “not Trump supporters, they have been confirmed to be Antifa" – an allegation the FBI has repeatedly stamped as absolutely false. Texas Republicans who knew better but elected Paxton twice to be our state's top law enforcement officer must sleep well at night knowing he's on the job.

Other Republicans sounding election fraud alarm such as Sen. Ted Cruz and those in Central Texas are now distancing themselves from Trump and the mob, even as some voice doubts about whether the president actually incited violence. Just more locker room talk? Gauge for yourself Trump’s belligerence before dispatching riled-up demonstrators up Pennsylvania Avenue, and after weeks and weeks of outraged rhetoric and tweets similarly claiming a stolen election: "We fight, we fight like hell, and if you don't fight, you're not going to have a country anymore." (Trump also told supporters on Jan. 6 that he would walk up Pennsylvania Avenue with them, then vanished without explanation from the field of combat.) Consider Republican Congressman Mo Brooks' words at this pre-riot rally: "Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass!" Or 25-year-old Republican Congressman Madison Cawthorn: "Wow, this crowd has some fight in it!" Or Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, hailed "America's mayor" after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, last Wednesday at this very same White House rally calling for "trial by combat" in disputing election results despite the opinions of scores of judges and justices in weeks past and individual state recounts of the votes: "This was the worst election in American history. This election was stolen in seven states. They picked states where they had crooked Democratic cities, where they could push everybody around, and it has to be vindicated to save our republic. This is bigger than Donald Trump, it's bigger than you and me. It's about these monuments and what they stand for. This has been a year in which they have invaded our freedom of speech, our freedom of religion, our freedom to move, our freedom to live. I'll be darned if they're going to take away our free and fair vote, and we're going to fight to the very end to make sure that doesn't happen."

Given that some of us now retired from the journalism profession have seen younger colleagues repeatedly deemed "the enemy of the people" by President Trump and his supporters the past several years, given that we saw the mob last week carry signs such as "The media is the virus" and scrawl on Capitol walls "Murder the Media," given that some journalists were threatened and assaulted last week, our thoughts are surely relevant at this juncture. Shortly after the mob overran the Capitol, a longtime friend who worked at major newspapers fact-checking news stories and making sure headlines were accurate decided she'd had enough of “friends” spreading alarm over partisan-manufactured crises and crazed conspiracy theories issuing like wisps of smoke from shadowy social-media echo chambers: "Right-wingers: You are no longer my friend if you share from Parler, QAnon or their ilk." Another cherished friend and former newspaper colleague of mine, a military veteran who served honorably overseas in hostile settings in both hemispheres and whose newspaper writings never betrayed his personal politics, offered this frank response:

"I am thankful that you obviously understand the seriousness of this threat. I confess I did not until recently. I thought it was too weird to believe many people actually would do something as drastic as attack the Capitol and have plans which very well may have included capturing and executing 'enemies' of this insane president. Read this morning’s Washington Post story of Ms. Babbitt, the protester who was shot and killed. They have learned her background, her radicalization and belief in QAnon’s conspiracy theory of Democrats’ pedophile ring and the like. She is quoted (I think it was tweeting) as she neared the Capitol that she was now part of a crowd of several million (crazy exaggeration of crowd size) marching on the building to fulfill what the QAnon folks call 'the storm' — a deadly comeuppance on the Dems. Oh my gosh! My eyes were opened. This is REAL. I don’t think it just goes away. These folks are waging a real war in their own minds. They are driven. They feel justified. You may already know all this. I feel stupid, with all my military background and experience. I did NOT believe they were dedicated to — let’s be honest — killing their enemies. They believe WE are the enemy. I think their attack on the Capitol is far from the end of it."

My own perspective is different. I retired from the profession only two months ago and have been regularly exposed to wide-ranging varieties of the Trumpian mindset in the mostly rural Central Texas stretches between the Austin metropolitan area and the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Some Trump supporters I know (and even like personally) are supportive of him because of his strides in boosting our economic fortunes through deregulation, tax-cutting and tariffs; whenever I have mentioned, say, his constitutional transgressions or his costing American lives by bungling the White House response to the pandemic yet raging, they have cast their eyes downward and acknowledged his slips of tongue and temperament, then snapped: "But look at what he's done for the stock market!" Others, however, are thoroughly radicalized and at this very moment confident and upbeat that orders for implementation of martial law have been issued and that Trump will remain in power, elections and constitutional frameworks notwithstanding. As a retired sportscaster and friend of mine from years ago noted on his Facebook page this week: "Looks like it's all about to go down very soon. Have cash, food and a full tank of gas for about 10 days. MAGA people who are in the know, know. This will be a happy and unbelievable historic day." A local nurse thoroughly enraptured by the president's commanding charisma posted this past weekend what she and others claim is a social media message direct from the president: "I have invoked the Insurrection Act of 1807 to address the treasonous rebellion conducted by Democrats and Republicans, CCP agents, the FBI, DOJ, CIA and others to undermine, corrode and dismantle the United States of America and its Constitution. These entities pose a direct threat to national security. I will remain president indefinitely until all domestic enemies are arrested." The vehemence of some local Trump disciples, the rage targeting me as a domestic enemy in recent years, has been so hostile and unbalanced that my wife the past two years feared I would be shot dead in the manner of famed Waco newspaperman William Cowper Brann in 1898. To his credit, Brann took his attacker with him.

And so, sure, a Trump-roused mob of terrorists and insurrectionists and thugs storming the U.S. Capitol surprised me last week but the tragic spectacle didn't shock me. As an opinion editor and a columnist at the Trib the past dozen years (and before that the paper's city editor and assistant managing editor), I've followed local conspiracy theorists and white supremacists and out-and-out anarchists. I've heard and read (through letters submitted to the opinion page and wildly ricocheting phone conversations) loony anti-government and “Deep State” rants. I've witnessed the over-the-top vilification of Democrats as morally corrupt, anti-American socialists and commies and heathen and devil worshipers and traitors in formerly respectable Republican circles and festering tea party ranks since at least 2009 when an African-American and a moderate Democrat was sworn in as our president. I had a front-row seat witnessing the beginning of the tea party movement amid its stated but hollow claims of nonpartisanship and dedication to addressing taxes and national debt. I watched as it mutated, within weeks, into an intensely partisan, never-compromise, alternate-reality cultural and political sphere brimming with hostility, racism and showy obstruction, ripe for reality-TV star Donald Trump's enduring 2011 claim that Barack Obama was foreign-born and thus illegitimate as president of the United States. (And, yes, the local tea party tried several times to get me fired, once appealing directly to the head of the newspaper chain.) Prominent tea party activist Amy Kremer pretty much verified at last week's pre-riot "Save America" rally what I suspected and feared and chronicled in 2009 and beyond: "You know, there's so much at stake today. We have been in the streets the past two months. There's a movement that has been born. I come from the tea party movement, and I'm asked all the time: What happened to the tea party? Well, we're still here. We just grew and morphed into something bigger and better, the MAGA movement. And I am convinced were it not for the tea party movement, we would not have had Donald J. Trump today. He has fought for us and he unlike any other president in our lifetime has put America first." (After violence erupted Kremer predictably scrambled to blame the Capitol Hill invasion on ol’ standby antifa, though this recourse of sham patriots is fast revealing the flat-out delusional and deceitful in GOP ranks, given the somber acknowledgement before U.S. House members by no less than House Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy during today’s impeachment debate: “Some say the riots were caused by antifa. There is absolutely no evidence of that, and conservatives should be the first to say so.")

While watching a bunch of entitled, profane, mostly white "patriots" ransacking the U.S. Capitol last week, threatening everyone from House Speaker Pelosi to Vice President Pence (the latter judged insufficiently loyal to President Trump because of his unwillingness to violate the Constitution on his master’s electoral behalf); while watching a Confederate battle flag hauled into the Capitol; while watching one rioter wearing a sweatshirt that read: "Camp Auschwitz: Work Brings Freedom" (translated: "Arbeit macht frei," the slogan marking a Nazi concentration and extermination camp where more than a million "undesirables" died), I thought back on a McLennan County Republican Club luncheon program in downtown Waco several years ago. The program focused on how Muslim influences threatened to contaminate Western Civilization. Hosted by none other than Waco native Pete Sessions, now our congressman, it was so personally repugnant that, even though I was there strictly as a work-a-day journalist, I nonetheless later reached out to an acquaintance I happened to notice in the crowd as the very stunned guest of a party club member. I apologized and assured her that I was not a McLennan County Republican Club member. (She had formerly overseen a local nonprofit helping immigrant families, legal and otherwise, adapt to U.S. norms and laws, including bolstering their children’s education. Turns out the party club member who invited her apologized as well.) And while watching a rioter use a pole with a U.S. flag attached to pummel a fallen Capitol Police officer on the very steps of the Capitol last week as others with "Keep America Great" flags and "Stop the Steal" signs either joined in the attack or stood by and watched — all this madness unfolding amid crowd chants of “USA! USA!” — I couldn’t help thinking of Republican state Sen. Brian Birdwell. He’s our supposed “war hero” who narrowly survived the 9/11 terrorist attack on the Pentagon and the self-styled patriot representing Waco and the surrounding area who stood up in a local church on Oct. 25 and suggested those allied against President Trump in the 2020 election do not love their country. Indeed, the American carnage of Jan. 6, 2021, reminds one of just how far we as a people have fallen in recent years amidst toxic rhetoric, glaringly obvious deceit, undying hatred and patriotism prostituted for dubious subversive ends, all fueled for the financial and political gains of a selfish few. In a PBS News Hour poll conducted a day after the Capitol Hill violence, one in five Republicans surveyed either supported the invasion of the Capitol (18 percent) or voiced uncertainty as to whether they supported it or not (2 percent). To quote an Ambler, Pennsylvania, resident in a brief but insightful letter to the conservative Wall Street Journal Saturday: “A truly sad day for America: desecration of our Capitol that everyone on United Flight 93 died to save on 9/11.”

Peggy Noonan, long the measured, dignified but frank voice of the few rational Republicans remaining, signaled in her Wall Street Journal column last Saturday the way forward for those who haven’t deluded themselves about the mob that stormed the Capitol, threatened to hang the vice president, killed a police officer and sent duly elected lawmakers, their staffers and the vice president fleeing for their lives:

“Find them, drag them out of their basements and bring them to justice. Use all resources, whatever it takes, with focus and speed. We have pictures of them; they like to pose. They larked about taking selfies and smiling unashamed smiles as one strolled out with a House podium. They were so arrogant they were quoted by name in news reports. It is our good luck they are idiots. Capitalize on that luck. Throw the book at them. Make it a book of commentaries on the Constitution. Throw it hard. They have shamed and embarrassed their country in the eyes of the world, which is not only a painful fact but a dangerous one. The world, and the young – all of us – need to see them pay the price.”

Among questions and dilemmas now swirling about the 25th Amendment, impeachment, resignation and disturbing FBI warnings of more promised insurgency by the far right: how much longer that list of nominees for presidential pardons has grown the past week – and whether, in the time remaining to President Trump, he will rescue the dutiful insurrectionists of Jan. 6, many of whom when arrested cited his entreaties to them as "patriots" to come to Washington and do his bidding to save the republic and his presidency. Will their presidential icon and commander in chief and savior now save them from justice the way he has Michael Flynn and Roger Stone or Paul Manafort? Or will he place himself, his family and his closest conspirators ahead of the interests and welfare of his faithful, unquestioning and adoring all-American rabble-rousers? Maybe he indeed can dismiss them all as antifa insurgents and be done with the matter.

As for Republicans now scrambling to argue against their long complicity in the horrors and rhetoric and outrages leading us to this moment in history: How do they now propose we respond to Trump, those who joined him in firing up a mob and, finally, those who then acted on his anger and indignation and victimhood? I'm willing to consider punitive, effective alternatives to the 25th Amendment and impeachment and sedition charges, but Republicans thus far offer nothing, further cementing the reality of an intellectually bankrupt party without principles, without values, without scruples beyond those ensuring them power and privilege and perks. To borrow from Congressman Brooks' war cry sending an army of Trump loyalists to overrun and ransack what some of us regard as a cathedral of democracy: When are Republicans going to assume personal responsibility, look at their own rank and file, take down the names of the seditionists, anarchists, insurrectionists and demagogues so long among them and finally kick some ass?

Don't hold your breath waiting.