The fight for the White House between the bosses’ two major parties — the Democrats and Republicans — has entered its final month, with Kamala Harris, the liberal media and the Joseph Biden Justice Department escalating their frenetic claims that Donald Trump is an unconscionable “threat to democracy.” Washington, D.C., District Judge Tanya Chutkan has now hopped on the bandwagon.
Just 35 days before the election, Chutkan unsealed a 165-page brief filed by Justice Department-appointed special counsel Jack Smith Oct. 2. It says Trump broke the law during the Jan. 6, 2021, melee at the Capitol. Smith charges the Republican presidential candidate with “conspiracy to defraud the United States” for his challenges to the outcome of the 2020 election.
Smith’s filing so close to the Nov. 5 election is a clear and conscious violation of long-standing Justice Department policy under both Republicans and Democrats not to take any steps that “could impact an election” within 60 days of the vote.
Writing in a New York Times op-ed Oct. 9, former Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith said that Trump’s opponents seem to believe “his unique horribleness justifies every conceivable aggressive step to keep him from becoming president. This sort of thinking reflects a tragic eight-year pattern of breaking rules and standards.”
Since before Trump won the presidency in 2016, the Democrats have used the FBI, partisan impeachment efforts, a series of legal actions and massive poundage of propaganda to further their efforts.
In doing so, the Democrats, never-Trump Republicans and the middle-class left have taken aim at constitutional protections won in struggle by generations of working-class fighters.
They claim a second Trump term will usher in nothing less than fascist rule. He’s “a threat unlike any we have faced before,” former Republican Congresswoman Elizabeth Cheney told a rally alongside Harris in Ripon, Wisconsin, Oct. 3.
In July, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that all those who occupy the presidency have immunity from prosecution for actions related to their official duties. It sent Smith’s charges back to Chutkan for her to determine if they should be thrown out or cut down. Before the judge could rule, Smith submitted a new, shorter indictment in an effort to keep the case running throughout the election campaign. And he urged her to make most of it public.
The editors of the Washington Post wrote that Smith’s brief provides more ammunition so “Americans have more case materials available to them shortly before they vote” showing that Trump is a “criminal.”
Charges Trump led an ‘insurrection’
Harris, a former San Francisco district attorney, spent a big hunk of her speech at the Oct. 3 Ripon rally acting as a prosecutor, seeking to put Trump away. She claimed, “He sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol, where they assaulted law enforcement” Jan. 6, and “he threatened the life of his own vice president and refused to engage in the peaceful transfer of power.”
Biden told an Oct. 4 press briefing that Trump will threaten a peaceful transfer of power again this coming January.
But in fact, on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump urged supporters to march and “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard” at a rally at the Capitol. In his new court brief Smith tries to twist this clear statement into criminal conduct, saying Trump was “directing an angry crowd of supporters to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification.”
At the time, Twitter took down a video Trump had posted there as his supporters were entering the building. “We had an election that was stolen from us,” Trump told them, “but you have to go home now. We have to have peace.”
Smith’s case and the Democrats’ campaign is a frontal assault on free speech and assembly, protections that are vital for workers and our unions today. If the rulers can get away with doing this to Trump, a capitalist politician, they’ll try the same and far worse against working people.
The notion that it’s illegal to argue an election has been “stolen” is dangerous. Every election under capitalist rule is rigged for the Democratic and Republican parties, and against working-class parties like the Socialist Workers Party.
Daunting petitioning requirements are aimed at limiting ballot access. Armies of Democratic and Republican lawyers are readied to try to disqualify any party they fear might take votes from their candidates, and they’re aggressively doing so today. The media — owned by the ruling capitalist families — works tirelessly to convince workers our only choice is to pick the “lesser evil.”
Hillary Clinton demands the press hew the line. “I don’t understand why it’s so difficult for the press to have a consistent narrative,” she complained Sept. 16. The press must “stick with it,” she said, trumpeting Trump’s “danger to our country.”
In a Sept. 30 editorial, the Times editors insisted Trump organized nothing less than “an insurrection” in 2021 and the election of Harris is essential to preserve “democracy.”
Rulers fear and loathing for workers
Behind the Democrats’ drive to vilify Trump is their hatred and growing fear of tens of millions of working people. More are willing to fight against boss attacks today and to consider new political roads forward.
“There is nothing you can say or do along the way to convince Donald Trump’s MAGA disciples that he is unfit to be president,” Colbert I. King writes in the Washington Post. He advises liberals to forget about those attracted to Trump and focus on getting enlightened people “whose lives are linked with yours to the polls.”
A Sept. 17 Vanity Fair article, “Timothy Snyder Explains How Americans Might Adapt to Fascism Under Trump,” quoted this Yale academic on the “20% or so of Americans who really, I think, authentically do want an authoritarian regime.”
The Democrats’ scare campaign reflects the fact they can’t run on the record of the Biden-Harris administration. Like Republicans, they have no proposals to hold off the dire impact of today’s capitalist crisis on workers’ lives.
Socialist Workers Party presidential candidate Rachele Fruit and her running mate, Dennis Richter, are getting a widespread hearing. The SWP candidates are building support for strikes and other union struggles fighting for higher wages, safer working conditions and livable schedules for workers. They call for a break with the bosses’ parties, for workers to build a party of labor on the road to taking political power into our own hands.