Revealing the quiet Trump insurrection in battleground states
The loud insurrection occurred on January 6. But there's another one afoot, trying to accomplish what the violent coup could not.
This Thursday marks the beginning of public hearings by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the Capitol, whose job is to reveal what came before and after an angry and violent mob stormed through the doors and windows of Congress as lawmakers attempted to certify President Joe Biden’s electoral victory.
That certification is usually a perfunctory duty, when both sides of the political aisle officially accept the results of a free and fair election.
But not this time.
There was a plot in the works, which we will learn more about in the hearings. The plan included people inside and outside of the White House, including Donald Trump and his closest allies, and perhaps some Republican members of Congress, who schemed to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
That has never happened before in American history: the denial of election results and a plan that combined legal maneuvers, unlawful offenses and outright violence in order to subvert democracy and install an autocratic tyrant to power.
Trump was obviously preparing such a plan even before the 2020 election, by claiming it would be stolen by fraud, and afterward by refusing to accept the clear results. It’s worth reiterating that Trump’s sycophantic Attorney General William Barr declared that “we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
The January 6 attack shocked most Americans, even people like Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority leader Kevin McCarthy, who called it “immoral,” named Donald Trump as personally and politically “responsible,” and promised to fully investigate it. But now most Republicans are singing a different tune, whitewashing the Insurrection and labeling the investigation a “smear campaign.”
This April, the Center on Faith and Justice hosted Rep. Jamie Raskin, a member of the January 6 committee, who hinted that revelations made public at the hearings will “blow the roof off the house.” Offering a glimpse of the committee’s investigations thus far, he described “three circles” of involvement in the insurrection:
In one ring was a mass demonstration. And that's the outer ring that included tens of thousands of people. The middle ring was the ring of the insurrection itself, and that was the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, the Aryan Nations, the militia groups, the QAnon networks, Christian Nationalists the organized militant political extremist groups that showed up, many of them having trained for weeks for this event. [These were] the first people to break our windows, attack our officers, injure people and help turn the demonstration into a riot. But the very inner ring, the inner core of it, was the realm of the coup. And it's a weird word for us to use in American political parlance, because we don't have any experience with coups and we think of coups as being things undertaken against presidents, but this was a coup perpetrated by the president, against the vice president and against the Congress. And that was an attempt to essentially steal away the presidential election results and to preserve himself in power for another four years.
You can watch the entire conversation with Raskin in the video below or listen to it via this episode of our podcast, Soul of the Nation.
At one point in our discussion, Raskin revealed that Pence aides told the committee that the Vice President refused to get in a Secret Service car to take him away from the Capitol after the attack and before the election was certified. He said, “I am not getting in that car.”
I hope to hear more about that moment in these hearings. Did Pence, who had always been so loyal to Trump, have a moment of constitutional conscience? We will see.
So that’s the “loud insurrection,” which we’ll hear more about starting this Thursday. I hope the revelations do indeed blow the roof off the house – even more, I hope those responsible are held accountable.
But there’s also a quiet insurrection afoot.
Election denial has become a litmus test in many Republican primaries, with a few exceptions like Georgia. Gerrymandering and overt voter suppression is directly and deliberately aimed at voters of color around the country. Recently, Politico reported a story about Republicans training volunteer “poll watchers” in how to single out and challenge the votes of people in line in “urban areas.”
“This is completely unprecedented in the history of American elections that a political party would be working at this granular level to put a network together,” Nick Penniman, founder and CEO of Issue One, an election watchdog group, told Politico. “It looks like now the Trump forces are going directly after the legal system itself and that should concern everyone.”
And that’s not all.
The New York Times recently ran a story about Republicans running for Secretary of State offices in battleground states, who would control the running and processing of elections. All are election deniers and/or QAnon conspiracy theorists who call themselves “America First” candidates.
The Times reports:
“Key figures in the effort to subvert the 2020 presidential election have thrown their weight behind a slate of Republican candidates for secretary of state across the country, injecting specious theories about voting machines, foreign hacking and voter fraud into campaigns that will determine who controls elections in several battleground states. The America First slate comprises more than a dozen candidates who falsely claim the 2020 election was stolen from Donald J. Trump.”
In other words, some of the people who falsely claim that the last election was stolen, are now plotting to steal the next one.
This is the quiet insurrection, the one most of us don’t see or hear, that is working diligently to accomplish what the violent Insurrection of January 6 could not: to delegitimize the election of Joe Biden, or any Democrat, and install Donald Trump as president.
I believe that white supremacy is at the core of this anti-democratic movement, and a commitment to white minority rule in an increasingly racially diverse society is the underlying goal of all these efforts.
This GOP-led war on democracy is based on lies, promoting fear of others, injecting racial hatred and inciting violence – all of which is contrary to Jesus’ message. But it has taken hold in some of our churches, especially in the white evangelical world.
Last week, I joined The Mehdi Hasan Show on Peacock to offer my response to the leader of one such church: Greg Locke, a pastor from Tennessee who has called Democrats “demons,” and screamed at Democrats to “get out” of his church because “no Christian could vote Democrat.”
Locke himself was in Washington during Jan 6 insurrection – he got as far as the Capitol steps – and pledges there will be more, chillingly pointing his finger at his audience while screaming: “You ain’t seen an insurrection yet … it’s going to get worse!”
It is tempting to dismiss Locke’s words as a theatrical tantrum from an ego-maniacal performer who clearly loves the attention. But we must take his words seriously, as they reveals the rise of an ideology, which I would also call an idolatry, that must be named as White Christian Nationalism, the biggest threat to democracy in America.
Locke may be the clearest expression of the noxious theology of White Christian National, but he is far from alone.
After the Jan 6 attack on our citadel of democracy, I got calls from evangelical leaders who were agonizing with the knowledge that some of their people were inside the Capital with Confederate flags, poles and clubs and nooses, chanting “Hang Pence” when the Vice President failed to cooperate with Donald Trump’s instruction to block the certification of the election. Some of the insurrectionists even lifted Jesus name in prayer after they broke into the Senate chambers, a sacrilege to both religion and democracy.
You cannot lift Jesus' name to any of this. It is literally, theologically, spiritually, and biblically anti-Christ. And the courage to say that will become a test of faith for every white church pulpit in America.
I watched Locke say that “the Church will take victory by force!...It’s in the Bible!”
No, it’s not. That is facism and not Christian faith. They are opposite. And Locke’s gospel is opposite to the gospel. Locke, who I won’t call a pastor, is anti-Christ. (And Mr. Locke, I will debate you anytime and anyplace.)
As I said on The Mehdi Hasan Show, democracy requires us to treat fellow citizens, even political opponents and adversaries, as neighbors, whom Jesus told us to love. To label them as “demons” is virtually a license to kill, and profoundly anti-Christ.
As I told Hasan, this is the key: racialized fascism in America will need churches to succeed. And only churches can stop it.
How many pastors, particularly white evangelical pastors, will be willing to call out this Christian facism, this White Christian Nationalism from their pulpits? That will not just be a test for our democracy, but a test of faith in our time.