The chaos in American politics could – if possible – get even worse when Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon tells what he knows about what happened on the dramatic day when the Congress building was stormed.
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Steve Bannon, referred to by many as the man who made Trump president, was himself involved in Trump’s attempts to change the election result.
Bannon was in Washington in the days leading up to the January 6 attack, and is said to have been involved in planning the demonstrations and the coup attempt.
Last year, he was arrested and charged with showing contempt for Congress. He is also accused of refusing to provide documents in response to the committee’s summons.
It has now been announced that he will testify at the congressional hearings, where they have been investigating the details behind the storming of the Congress on 6 January 2021 for almost a year.
Many believe that Bannon, by testifying now, is only trying to save his own skin as he risks imprisonment for not meeting previous summonses.
–Now it’s so bad that Bill Clinton says that outright he fears that US democracy will collapse. How in the world could it go so wrong?
– I actually think that there is a pretty big risk that we can completely lose our constitutional democracy in a couple of decades if we make bad decisions. “I have never been so concerned about the structure of our democracy,” Clinton said in The Late Late Show with James Corden on CBS in mid-June.
The 42nd President of the United States is not alone in his concern.
Not since the American Civil War (1861–1865) has American democracy been in greater acute danger than it is now.
–American democracy has been a matter of course. It has been solid and in many ways well-functioning.
But in recent years it has suffered a serious setback.
There is a greater polarization between Democrats and Republicans than before. The Democrats’ left has strengthened – but above all, the Republican Party has been radicalized for more than a decade.
What has happened in recent weeks with the congressional hearing and the Supreme Court ruling on abortion has caused the debate to accelerate further.
There is now serious talk about the danger of a democratic collapse.
–CNN had the fall of 2021 a poll of 93 percent of Americans believed that their democracy was under pressure (paradoxically, it was Trump supporters who primarily believed that democracy is under attack).
When Joe Biden gave his inaugural address in January of that year, he also acknowledged that American democracy was more fragile than he had thought.
No wonder – two weeks earlier, Trump supporters had stormed Congress to prevent a peaceful transfer of power from Trump to Biden.
Admittedly, another poll shows that almost no Americans cares about democracy, but it is difficult to take the answers in that survey very seriously.
In any case, American democracy has been under pressure before. Especially in connection with the Vietnam War, the assassinations and the racial unrest in the 1960s and 70s, many were worried.
But democracy stood its ground.
When Gerald Ford took over as president after the Watergate scandal forced Richard Nixon to resign, he said in his speech to the nation: «Americans! Our long national nightmare is over. Our constitution works. Our magnificent republic is governed by laws, not men. Here it is the people who rule ».
That Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon after the Watergate revelations can, of course, be debated, but on the other hand, there is a fundamental difference from what is now: the political mechanisms of correction worked.
Republicans no longer supported Nixon after the revelations surfaced. The president resigned voluntarily and escaped possible prosecution for the crime. The system worked.
–In a liberal democracy, no one is above the law, not even the president. That is the point of the constitution.
But when it comes to Trump, it’s different. His supporters still follow him, believing that the storming of Congress was “legitimate.”
Republicans are largely boycotting the Truth Commission. The party refuses to take on board what has been said about Trump’s role. Then the system does not work.
The polarization is now so strong that it promotes extremism.
Among those in the forefront when Congress was attacked on January 6, 2021, was the paramilitary group The Oath Keepers, which was founded by Stewart Rhodes in 2009. Ever since then, he has talked about the need for a civil war to save American democracy.
–Among extremist Republicans, authoritarian ideas are gaining ground more and more often. Trump supporters, for example, point to Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán as an inspiration.
Democrats’ hopes of driving Donald Trump out of US politics once and for all seem twisted. The Republican Party is most concerned with rewriting what happened on January 6, 2021.
An indictment against Trump may be a kind of threat to democracy, but if he is guilty of what has come out lately, then the leadership in Washington today has no alternative.
The evidence that Trump tried to prevent the takeover by force can give him ten years in prison.
Witnesses other than Cassidy Hutchinson may provide a legal basis for Attorney General Merrick Garland to prosecute Trump – and right now it seems more likely than most Americans to be convinced of his guilt.
At the same time, an indictment against the 45th president can also be a dangerous path to take.
The nightmare, of course, is if Trump were to become president again – and catch up with the same coin …
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