Trump's latest sociopathic unhinged rant
Blames January 6th insurrection on Pence's refusal to flout the Constitution and to criminally defraud the United States in violation of 18 U.S.C. 371
Donald Trump is more dangerous than an infected wild boar.
Yesterday, he crazily foisted responsibility for the January 6th violent insurrection against the Capitol on Vice President Mike Pence’s refusal to succumb to Trump’s serial browbeating of Pence to violate his obligation under the Twelfth Amendment to count state-certified electoral votes in the 2020 presidential election, which would have been an impeachable high crime and misdemeanor against the Constitution; and, would have constituted conspiracy to defraud the United States of a peaceful transfer of presidential power in violation of 18 U.S.C. 371.
As reported in today’s Washington Post, “Trump claims that the violence he inspired on Jan. 6 was Pence’s fault,” Trump told reporters, “Had he sent the [state-certified] votes back to the legislatures, [Trump’s mob] wouldn’t have had a problem with Jan. 6, so in may ways you can blame him for Jan. 6. Had he sent them back to Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, the states, I believe, number one, you would have had a different outcome. But I also believe you wouldn’t have had ‘Jan. 6’ as we call it.”
Mr. Trump is a constitutional dunce. He once opined that the Constitution has 12 articles rather than 7, and pronounced that under Article 2, the President has the right to do anything he wants as president, a flagrantly extraconstitutional assertion that earmarked President Richard Nixon’s downfall. (Remember Nixon-Frost: “When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
Some constitutional provisions are imprecise. But the role of the Vice President under the Twelfth Amendment is not. It is as clear as the 35 year age requirement for the presidency. The Amendment provides that the Vice President, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, shall open sealed state-certified electoral votes, “and the votes shall then be counted.” The Vice President’s role is ministerial with no room for discretion. It had been so understood for more than two centuries after the Amendment was ratified in 1804.
In Trump’s lunatic world, an obligation to count votes includes the discretion not to count the votes and to flout the obligation. An obligation to uphold and defend the Constitution includes the discretion to sabotage and destroy the Constitution. Trump is afflicted with a terrifying degree of madness. Even Trump’s legal poodles balked at endorsing his Orwellian rewrite of the Twelfth Amendment.
Trump’s blaming Pence for the criminal insurrection and companion crimes that stained January 6 is as demented as would have been Adolf Hitler’s blaming Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, the UK, and Russia for his illegal wars of aggression refusing peacefully to bow to his ambitions and saddling Jews with responsibility for the by Holocaust by refusing suicide.
Mr. Trump is a sociopathic maniac—a living wrecking ball against the Constitution and rule of law for which so many have risked and given that last full measure of devotion. To support Mr. Trump in any way is to provide material assistance to undoing the American Revolution. Ostracism is the only moral stance.