In the weeks after Donald Trump’s election victory, corporate media is breathlessly reporting on all of Donald Trump’s bizarre and unqualified Cabinet nominations that include Rep. Matt Gaetz for attorney general, who’s been under an House ethics investigation for sex trafficking with underage girls; Fox News host Pete Hegseth for defense secretary, who paid a financial settlement to a woman who accused him of sexual assault; Robert F. Kennedy Jr., promoter of deadly anti-science conspiracy theories and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard who’s accused of repeating Kremlin talking points verbatim.
As Trump’s authoritarian clown car takes shape, the first former president ever to be charged with and convicted of felonies will escape legal accountability for his alleged crimes, including his attempt to subvert the 2020 election, taking classified documents to his Florida estate and the postponement of any sentence in his New York conviction for covering up a hush money pay-off to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
Trump’s 2024 candidacy and election victory was made possible by President Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland’s 2½-year delay in indicting the twice impeached president for these serious crimes, enabling his expensive lawyers to slow walk the court cases and invite intervention by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ultimately gave Trump absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Sarah Kendzior, author of “They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent,” who reflects on the fact that, under Biden, the United States became the first country in modern history to face an attempted coup and failed to punish the coup plotters – allowing them to run and win the next election.
SARAH KENDZIOR: Yes, this is a tremendous failure and you’re one of the few hosts who allow me to speak about it in public. There is a tremendous effort to lie about what Merrick Garland was doing to make up all these stories, that he was secretly fixing things behind the scenes. But that was not happening. It was not going to happen.
And that was very clear from the start, because Merrick Garland was installed by people deeply tied to Jared Kushner. He was installed by Jared Kushner’s lawyer, who is his lifelong mentor. That’s a woman named Jamie Gorelick. So already I was wary when he came in. I thought maybe the gravity of the situation would cause him to do the right thing.
But that was not the case. And, you know, people really should grasp that this has never happened in world history. I’m kind of astonished by the dearth of scholars who are not pointing this out. All of these scholars of authoritarianism and fascism and so forth. There has never been a openly plotted coup in which the coup plotters and all of their helpers were not punished and were allowed to stay in Congress and were allowed to make laws.
And then the coup plotter was allowed to run for president again, like mafia Grover Cleveland. I mean, it’s nuts. It has never happened even in the most severe authoritarian regimes. But people thought Biden would make real change. They thought that Biden would hold Trump accountable. It became clear to me in the spring of 2021 that Biden and the DOJ and Congress were going to do nothing to hold Trump accountable.
And it has been horrible to know that for three full years and watch people kind of delude themselves with Jack Smith and all of these other kind of illusory figures, because it’s a tragedy, because the people that get hurt in the end are ordinary American people and especially the most vulnerable groups, you know, immigrants, migrants, anybody who’s not white, women, you know, all sorts of people are going to suffer because of this.
And that is on Joe Biden and his administration. And that choice to let Trump go free.
SCOTT HARRIS: Sarah, in your recent post-election newsletter, you observed that Trump’s threat to democracy is much more about a mafia state takeover than it is about fascism or authoritarianism. Expand on that, if you would.
SARAH KENDZIOR: Yes. This is another thing that I think folks are getting wrong, because while it’s true that Trump — he certainly uses fascist rhetoric, he supports a lot of authoritarian policies. You see them laid out in Project 2025.
I don’t think Trump, as an individual cares about any of those policies. But, you know, he does what his ideologues tell him. He’s more of a figurehead.
Nonetheless, it’s dangerous for the American people. But what he does want to do and what the people surrounding him want to do, whether it’s plutocrats like Elon Musk or the Russian mafia oligarchs and Israeli oligarchs that he’s, you know, been associated with for about, you know, 30 or 40 years. They want the country to collapse.
What they want is something akin to the collapse of the Soviet Union. And then afterwards, the 1990s oligarchs looted and pillaged and made themselves extremely wealthy while letting the country fall apart. And it’s a different situation because, you know, the USSR was a tyrannical regime. And then it had, you know, individual republics that were bound together. But that’s why so many pundits and so many politicians have been pushing this fake “red state-blue state” narrative to try to come up with something equivalent like this state is inherently different than the other state, you know, and therefore we need a national divorce.
And that’s absolute nonsense. What you mostly have is a country of disillusioned, fed-up people that don’t really fit neatly into any political category and that need to hold on to the integrity of this country as a whole. Because if they try to split us up, it’s going to be a bunch of warring little plutocrat fiefdoms that will try to get resources.
And I think the motivation behind this is climate change. It’s a fear of losing, you know, food, water, basic things, of those becoming more scarce. So these oligarchs and plutocrats want to hoard them. You know, this is the logical strategy. It’s also incredibly evil. And ordinary people will suffer. But it’s not quite fascism because fascism requires a loyalty to the state, a desire to expand the state.
And that’s never been what Trump’s interested in. You know, he’s a corporate raider. He was a corporate raider in New York and he kind of views the United States as something, you know, that needs to crash and collapse. And then it has the most utility to him and his friends.
For more information, visit Sarah Kendzior’s website at sarahkendzior.com, follow her on Twitter @SarahKendzior and subscribe to her Substack newsletter at
substack.com/@
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