Grand Old Unraveling by Grand Old Unraveling. The Republican Party Donald Trump & the Rise of Authoritarianism (2024)

Author:Grand Old Unraveling. The Republican Party, Donald Trump & the Rise of Authoritarianism (2024)
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780700636549
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Published: 2024-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

“be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920”

Following Donald Trump’s charge that his presidency had been “stolen”—not by the voters but by nefarious practices of days long gone by—he accused Democrats of having dead people and noncitizens cast ballots; claimed trucks rolling late at night into urban centers were stuffed with Democratic ballots; claimed that suitcases filled with Biden ballots were pulled out from under tables; and even claimed that Italian satellites surreptitiously tapped into voting machines and switched votes from Trump to Biden. Making these wild accusations resulted in a level of intimidation for poll workers that was reminiscent of the Old South, where Blacks were lynched for trying to vote, and every means possible was used to shape election outcomes. Outside the home of Michigan’s secretary of state, armed men appeared, shouting obscenities as she was decorating for Christmas with her four-year-old child.171 In Wisconsin, officials were targeted, and their families threatened with violence. Dane County election official Scott McDonell said the phone calls and emails warning of personal harm to himself and his family were “a coordinated attack . . . on democracy.”172 In Washington State, the election director’s home address was posted online along with the message, “Your days are numbered.”173

Testifying before the House Select Committee investigating the attack on the Capitol, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensberger, described sexualized text messages his wife received on her cell phone, along with a break-in at the home of his widowed daughter-in-law, after he refused to follow Donald Trump’s order to “find 11,780 votes” to make Trump victorious.174 Arizona’s Republican House Speaker, Rusty Bowers, described dreading the weekly Saturday demonstrations outside his home with protesters calling him a “pedophile, pervert, and corrupt politician,” while blaring loudspeakers disturbed his daughter as she lay gravely ill.175 Philadelphia’s election commissioner, Al Schmidt, a lifelong Republican, detailed numerous death threats targeting himself and his family after Trump called him a RINO (Republican in name only). Among the threatening messages the Schmidts received was one that read, “You are a traitor. Perhaps 75 cuts and 20 bullets will soon arrive,” and another that read, “heads on spikes. treasonous schmidts.”176 Schmidt defended the integrity of the 2020 election but subsequently resigned his post.177 The Republican Speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, Bryan Cutler, disconnected his home telephone because “it would ring all hours of the night and would fill up with messages.”178 Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist and talk show host, declared that if Republicans keep losing elections, the solution would be to establish a “dictatorship”: “We need to take control of the media or take control of the government and force the people to believe what we believe or force them to play by our rules.”179

Perhaps the most powerful, and disturbing, testimony before the House Select Committee came from Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, an African American who worked in the Fulton County election headquarters processing absentee ballots and voter registrations and counting votes. On election nights she was assisted by her mother, Ruby Freeman, who also worked for the elections department.

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