Washington, DC
Since the release of the Mueller report back in March 2019, the Democrats in the Congress have been trying—unsuccessfully—to execute on their constitutionally mandated oversight responsibility; but the president’s team in the White House and their Republican co-conspirators in the Senate—led by Senate Majority leader, Mitch McConnell, with amiable assistance from The Consigliere, Bill Barr, the obstructionist attorney general at DOJ—have so far frustrated them at every turn, ignored with apparent impunity every subpoena, blocked witnesses from testifying, and obstructed with bureaucratic wrangling every contempt citation.
Everyday this president, The Bad King, breaks with established norms, ignores long-held democratic traditions, violates the constitution and the laws of the land. The mood in the country—until just recently—has been mysteriously docile. For the longest time the Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and her caucus in the House have tried to avoid impeachment. Until just a few months ago, Democrat lawmakers had shown little appetite to hold the president accountable. But as the primaries loom, activists in the House like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Talib have changed the dynamic, altered the debate, and shifted the consensus so that hearings have now begun as a prelude to the House voting out an actual bill of impeachment.
All the attempts by the Congress to reign in the obstruction efforts of a rogue White House will ultimately have to be resolved in the courts, but that will drag out the process and that is what The Bad King is relying on. The issue of whether the IRS was obligated to produce his taxes to the Ways and Means committee has already been blocked by the Supreme Court which voted in an extraordinary and purely partisan, party-line decision to overturn an unambiguous existing law (federal statute 6103) to rule in favor of the president.
The whole activist Republican amalgam of judicial and constitutional obstruction, lawlessness, executive overreach, and abuse of power—the denials of committee requests for documents, and subpoenas for witnesses to appear to testify—has moved into the courts. The conscious and deliberate strategy to thwart and delay every official oversight proceeding of the House Democrats has worked wondrously well for the White House so far, leaving the country’s constitutionally framed, Madisonian-system of checks and balances effectively in tatters. The more Democrats are checked in their efforts to reign in the president’s lawlessness, the more he goads them to impeach him—trusting as he does that in a Senate trial, managed by the Republican majority leader, he will never be convicted and removed from office. Now with the 2020 election just months away, it is too late in the process for that to happen. Despite all the revelations of unseemly presidential behavior (defiance of legally legislated laws and outright obstruction of justice) that have leaked since the debut of the Mueller report, and the hearings now going on in the House, a majority of the U.S. electorate seemingly still has no appetite for impeachment.
This leaves the Democrats in a quandary about how to proceed. Do they concentrate solely on talking about health care and the economy while the president gives the Fake News media and the American public the middle finger—gets the now inappropriately named Department of Justice (The Crime Council) under his politically compromised AG, Bill Barr, and now personal attorney to aid and enable him in his obstructionist policies—or do they work to hold the president accountable in the House. He is turning upside down, standing on its head, 238 years of democratic process and traditions. His supporters, the largely despised and forgotten, willfully ignorant, voters in Flyover Country (rural “soccer moms” in Middle America and their NRA husbands, in states like Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Iowa) cheer and applaud the president’s obstruction and lawlessness. They believe his Witch Hunt allegations against the Democrats and the media.
At the Kremlin in Moscow, the President of Russia (the Puppet Master) is leery of The Bad King as a candidate in the upcoming election but loves the chaos and division that the incumbent president is sowing across the country. The 2020 election is now still almost eight months away, but after more than three years of bitter political infighting the country is more politically divided than ever. With hate crimes already on the rise throughout the United States, the president has been out on the stump stoking the hate and fear among his MAGA base and further dividing the country. Already there has been an unprecedented level of violence at some of his early rallies.
For the man in Moscow this is good news. The Bad King, the unwitting (witting?) dupe, is doing more to promote the expansionist, anti-Western policies of the Russian Federation than the Russian president could ever do by himself—from Brexit, the enfeebling of the European Union and NATO, to the total realignment of the Middle East power structure. The Bad King—with his racism, xenophobia, and bumbling nationalism—is the biggest threat to the peace and security of the entire world order. Racist, anti-immigration nationalist groups—like the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and the National Front—are in the ascendancy across Europe and America.
In the United States, as the election draws closer, the president is again exciting fear and hatred on the campaign trail, exhorting his cadres of supporters—with the help of social media, Bots, and imported Russian agent provocateurs and agitators—to incite violence in clashes with MAGA supporters in every major American city across the country. Over the next few critical months in front of the election, Billy and Rosie will see this happen at almost every major campaign stop.
That afternoon Rosie does a live TV spot with MSNBC anchor, Nicole Wallace, on her show “Deadline: White House.” Shane has passed along to Rosie more information, coming through Elena, on how Russian “specialists” and Bots are using social media to influence the election in favor of The Bad King and against the narrowing field of Democratic challengers vying for the nomination. Rosie writes another piece on Russian election meddling that Shane will have posted first in the New York Times and picked up in the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and other national newspapers. Rosie identifies, from the intelligence provided by Elena, the hashtags of new Bots, posing as U.S. persons and groups (phony personas), being used by the IRA (Internet Research Agency) to disseminate their anti-democratic propaganda and how the Russians have seemingly up-ed their game by creating videos of false (digitally created personas) artificial characters designed to represent actual American individuals and groups voicing on social media extreme right-wing views, organizing MAGA rallies and writing and disseminating—posting on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram—disparaging comments about the dwindling field of Democrat candidates. The Democrats have been trying for more than a year to get legislation through the Congress to strengthen the country’s election infrastructure, but Republicans resist all efforts and show no real interest in protecting the 2020 election against Russian meddling.
Charleston, South Carolina
The next morning, Billy is met by Rosie and her team at Dulles Airport. Their gear—suitcases, cameras, and sound equipment—is stowed in the aft baggage compartment of the CJ-3. The ground crew has the plane prepped and ready to go. Billy taxis the small jet out onto the runway. The tower clears the plane for takeoff and Billy pushes the throttles forward. The CJ-3 gathers speed until 2,000 feet down the runway the nose comes up and the plane lifts off beginning a steep climb. Rosie is up front in the cockpit with Billy during the takeoff, but once at cruising altitude she unbuckles her seat harness, gives Billy a quick kiss, and goes back to join her friends on the news team in the passenger cabin.
Later that afternoon, Billy, Rosie, and her team are at a MAGA rally in Charleston, South Carolina. It was here in 2016 in the Charleston Harbor, in the belly of the USS Yorktown—a World War II aircraft carrier turned museum—that the Republican candidate announced his notorious Muslim ban. It is here that Billy and Rosie first witness the violence that will characterize The Bad King’s rallies throughout the 2020 campaign. He starts out talking in his usual superlatives: using words like very and greatest, words like tremendous, wonderful, or beautiful. He particularly likes the word winning. He reminds the crowd that in the first three and one-half years of his administration there has been so much winning that they are probably tired of it:
“Are you tired of all the winning?” he asks rhetorically.
“Yes!” they answer in a unified cheer. He gives the crowd a double thumbs up, and they respond with a “Make America Great Again” chant. He reminds them, unblushingly, that he is a stable genius and the best president since Lincoln. He tells them they are not to blame for their problems, that they are the victims of the ruling establishment elite—a vast Deep State conspiracy that only he can fix if they help him to four more years. He promises to keep fighting for them, to continue trying to prosecute his political foes (Democrats) who are the enemies of the people. They shout back in unison:
“Lock ‘em up.”
The crowd inside has filled a large open space on a lower deck used to display old Navy bombers, World War II vintage fighter planes and helicopters—a sea of angry faces around the small island that is the press pen. Just like at an old Southern Baptist tent revival, the rabid MAGA supporters—all decked out in their MAGA rally regalia, hats, and T-shirts—are in a state of MAGA induced ecstatic rapture. For them, Jesus Christ has returned to earth in the unlikely incarnation of The Bad King. Just in the past few days, the reluctant Democrats have finally moved to impeach him in the House. The president calls it a treasonous coup attempt by his enemies to subvert and destroy his presidency. He has only to mention the name of an adversary or cite a hostile group like the media or Fake News, and—as if on cue—an angry supporter in the crowd yells back:
“Shoot ‘em.”
The Bad King then returns to a familiar theme. Amid a cacophony of cheers, he finishes up with a long and rambling, racist, xenophobic diatribe against the Mexican rapists and the Muslim invaders. He tells them that the country is full . . . that there is no room for more immigrants. And though by this time he has illegally misappropriated money away from the military to start construction on the wall that he promised Mexico would pay for, still he blames the Democrats again for not providing the necessary funding. The MAGA hats love it. This is, after all, what they came to hear from their champion.
Outside a voluble group of protesters is being confronted by an angry mob of white supremacists. Based off what Shane had told Rosie and him, Billy wonders if there are any Russian infiltrators among them. Fist fights break out and rocks and bottles are hurled into the group of protesters. More than twenty protesters will subsequently be taken to the hospital. This kind of violence is becoming almost a commonplace of MAGA rallies.
Police and National Guard troops enter the melee on the side of the white supremacists and MAGA supporters. More than a hundred protesters are arrested. Several are injured and in need of medical attention.
Informed of the violence outside, The Bad King—to the cheers of the agitated and excited crowd—blames Fake News and the media for the violence, for spreading lies and falsehoods about him and his candidacy. The protesters are bad people as he is happy to characterize them. And, again, he reiterates their responsibility for the violence.
“These are bad people,” he says to the angry mob, “. . . really bad people!”
“Shoot ‘em!” comes the angry chorus from the crowd.
Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are early leaders in the primary race and principal targets of The Bad King’s bombastic name-calling, lies, and character assassination. Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg (whom the president now mocks as Alfred E. Neuman, the Mad Magazine cover character from the 60’s) are right behind the leaders Biden and Sanders. Kamala Harris and the newly emerging, surprise come-from-behind billionaire candidate, Tom Steyer, are gaining support in the remaining pack of Democratic contenders.
The Bad King asks the crowd in his usual interactive way, “Do you really believe the people want a gay guy and a black woman running the country?”
He shrugs, purses his lips in that familiar oval. “C’mon, you tell me,” he beseeches the crowd, “. . . a gay guy and a black woman?” he asks again.
“No!” the crowd yells back in resounding unison. This now has become the usual tenor and tone of a MAGA rally. Billy and Rosie will see and experience many repeats of this same kind of vitriol on the 2020 campaign trail.