American democracy may die in four months

Last week, in a much-hyped but little-watched speech, President Trump gave a primetime address alleging (without evidence) that US elections are rigged. The White House and their allies set expectations high ahead of the speech, with Ohio Republican Senator Bernie Moreno claiming, “This could be the most important Oval Office speech since the Cuban Missile Crisis.” But in the end Trump did not announce any action. There was no announcement that he is suspending elections as some had feared. Moreno’s hype looked absurd. But was it?

Trump’s rambling speech, which only the networks MAGA controls – Fox and CBS – decided to air (the others now risk having their broadcast licenses revoked), may not have had any short-term impact. But when viewed in conjunction with the other recent speeches by his administration, we can see the long-term intentions. And they are terrifying.

“The presumption that US elections are legitimate died last week in Washington,” wrote Professor Robert Shpiner in The Guardian this week. “It was 237 years old. It did not die of one wound. It died of three, inflicted in a single day, in daylight, on the record. And the country, running to the loudest of them, never examined the one most likely to kill.”

The same day as Trump’s speech, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller (whose power far exceeds what his title suggests) gave speeches at an event entitled “The Resurgence of Political Terrorism”. It was an official US government ministerial attended by officials from more than 60 countries. In his speech, Rubio announced that the US counterterrorism architecture built up over the past 25 years to fight jihadist plots will now be retargeted toward the domestic left. The left, he said, is preparing “a revolt of the worst against the best”, accusing them of supporting the governments of Iran and Cuba.

“This is an international conference because we are facing a transnational threat. These are not distinct and isolated cells. They are interconnected networks. They do not recognise our borders. They do not believe, in fact, in the nation state itself. They coordinate, they communicate, they travel, they train, and they act together, sharing the same infrastructure, sharing the same enemies, sharing the same mission. Antifa militants and their comrades travel from across Europe and to the Americas to participate in each other’s attacks, to funnel propaganda and training materials and target information through shared encrypted channels, moving through underground networks of safe houses and finance, and sustain their operations through transnational funds.

And they work alongside hostile foreign states that share their mission, like Iraq’s Iranian proxy networks who are increasingly intimately tied to leftist militant groups around the world. The Cuban regime’s sprawling intelligence and ideological network helped to build the far-left in our country and in our hemisphere, and it remains inextricably linked to the far-left groups and movements across and beyond the West.”

Then came Miller, who called the left a “fatal cancer of civilisation” whose politics “always becomes a gulag”. He said antifa (antifascist) demonstrators are “all deformed in some way, in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism”. A leftist’s protests about their rights being violated “must fall on deaf ears” he told the assembled dignitaries, and authorities must be “completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilisation”.

The intended audience for these speeches was ostensibly international. These words are consistent with the US National Security Strategy published in December, and the recent announcement that the US State Department will award $3 million grants to MAGA-aligned groups who are ‘civilisational allies’ with the US regime. From the funding call, it is clear that the target is not only the far-left. It is also the centrist governments of Europe and the European Union itself.