“A Republic, if you can keep it.” An exhausted Benjamin Franklin uttered these prescient words on the last day of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, in response to the question, “Well Doctor what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”
Participants at the Convention, coming on the heels of the American Revolution, endured a hard-fought political battle, a nail biting war of words and sharp analytical debate over what legal framework would best protect a democratic republic. The Constitutional Convention’s underlying premise- that government could be subordinated to laws that applied to everyone, equally — shocked a world ruled by lawless and abusive monarchies.
George Washington, then just wrapping up his first term as president, was aching to leave public life for the country in Mount Vernon, saying politics had robbed him of “all expectations of private happiness in this world.” Ben Franklin, also steeped in political rancor and equally depleted by it, displayed a preternatural grasp of human nature when he intimated that political violence would eventually return.
Franklin’s warning, the Big Lie, and the 2022 midterms
Americans would see the first violent attempt to block the transfer of power 233 years after Franklin’s warning, despite Franklin’s and the Constitution’s best roadmap for how to avoid it.
In 2016, Americans elected as president a pampered television reality show host famous for reveling in the belittlement of others. Trump spent his four years in the Oval Office on-brand, turning political hatred, outrageous insults, and extreme rhetoric into a national pastime, while eschewing intelligence briefings and running up the third largest debt of any president in US history. In 2021, America’s one-term president tried to stop Congress from certifying an electoral vote count he’d lost, as his violent supporters stormed the capital.
Ultimately, Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results were thwarted due to lack of evidence, and by honor-driven public servants — largely Republican — who refused to break the law to advance Trump’s monarchical ambitions. But instead of landing him in prison for sedition, Trump’s coup attempt inspired other right wing opportunists to promote lawsuits and conspiracy theories promoting Trump’s rampage, which spilled over into the 2022 midterms.
The coup continues
Trump’s gangrenous infection of the GOP turned doubting the legitimacy of the 2020 election into a litmus test for candidates in 2022, who competed in the midterms to out-Trump each other.
Over half of all midterm Republican candidates parroted Trump’s big lie, whether they believed it or not. Trump’s pick for Governor of Arizona, Kari Lake, promised to abide by her election outcome only if she won. Among the GOP’s Senate candidates, J.D. Vance in Ohio, Ted Budd in North Carolina, Blake Masters in Arizona, and Kelly Tshibaka in Alaska each declined to commit to accepting the results of their races. In Pennsylvania, Tucker Carlson suggested a John Fetterman win would be “transparently absurd,” i.e., rigged, given Fetterman’s stroke-related language difficulties. (Meanwhile, supporting a brain-damaged former football player in Georgia who self-describes as “not that smart” was not transparently absurd.)
In the 2022 midterms, MAGA republicans orchestrated a systematic shift to replace honorable public servants at the state, federal, and local level with election-deniers, more than 200 of whom will take office in January. They gerrymandered districts beyond recognition, and broke up urban voting blocs to dissolve Democratic-leaning majorities. They planted visibly armed vigilantes in body armor at ballot boxes to menace voters, leaving two-fifths of midterm voters worried about threats of violence and intimidation.
In a parallel strategy, GOP operatives began suing to disenfranchise Democratic voters, filing lawsuits to throw out mail-in votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Last week they sued to disqualify mail-in ballots on technicalities, like undated envelopes, challenging obviously valid ballots that arrived before election day bearing a post-marked date.
Nonstop election denial feeds political violence
Even before votes were cast last week, Trump cast doubt on their legitimacy. As he did in 2020, Trump engaged in a prolonged effort to discredit election results in advance of the actual election. “Here we go again!” he wrote a week prior to last week’s midterms, “Rigged Election!”
Many of the MAGA operatives who stormed the capital last year believed Trump’s rigged election lies, because they are siloed by a right wing propaganda network that blocks the truth, like Russia’s state-run media. Consequently, Fox News-driven MAGA threats have metastasized far beyond January 6. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, election workers reported more than 1,000 incidents of harassment or hostility, including death threats, with 11% warranting a federal criminal investigation.
Although political violence hails from both sides, it is hardly even. Since 2015, right-wing extremists have been involved in 267 violent plots or attacks, compared with 66 for left-wing extremists; extremist ideologies were linked to 26 murders in the United States in 2021 alone. The Department of Homeland Security has warned repeatedly that the country’s top terrorism threat comes from domestic extremism motivated by white supremacist and right-wing ideologies, which are rampant among MAGA supporters.
There’s little guesswork in diagnosing the root cause: the ascendance of Trump, who profits wildly from vitriol. Trump, whose own attorney told him his stolen election data was false, calls his successor — America’s current President Joe Biden — an “enemy of the state.” He labels political opponents “un-American” and “evil.” He calls court decisions against him a “disgrace” and tells his uninformed supporters that judges who rule against him are “putting our country in great danger.” Trump whips up anger and outrage which he monetizes to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while priming a violent, uneducated, and heavily armed base to stand by, ready to attack if Trump is ever held legally accountable.
Trump’s profitable rancor inspires other MAGA leaders who have their own campaigns to finance, and their own armed base to rile. Marjorie Taylor Greene has expressed support for executing Democrats. Lauren Boebert said Jesus needed AR-15 rifles to “keep his government from killing him.” Kevin McCarthy joked that when he became speaker, it would be hard not to hit Speaker Nancy Pelosi with the speaker’s gavel, presumably on the head. When a MAGA man broke into Pelosi’s house and beat her husband on the head with a hammer, it was not a confounding leap.
A republic, if you can keep it
Now that partisan violence has gone largely unchecked by one of the nation’s ruling parties, it will escalate. America leaves the tumultuous midterms much as it entered: tragically divided and primed for political violence in 2024 and beyond.
Watching Ben Franklin’s prediction materialize is profoundly sad. Foreign allies, fellow democracies America has inspired for more than two centuries, weep to see us totter.
Understanding our nation’s history, fully grasping that desperate men gave their lives to escape a lawless government, is the only way to appreciate the danger of a defeated president who would be king.
To understand the historical underpinnings of the Constitution is to revere it for the timeless insight into human nature and beacon for universal freedom it represents. To understand its genius is the only way to recognize its vulnerability, and to know that freedom may, indeed, have an expiration date.
Sabrina Haake, a Chicago attorney and Gary resident, is a freelance columnist for the Post-Tribune.
