By Hook or By Crook by Geoff Carter « The Pen in Hand Blog

Illustration by Michael DiMilo

By Geoff Carter

Say what you will about him, one thing Donald Trump has been able to do is to surprise us —usually with his audacity. From his brazen looting of the National Treasury to his unwarranted and appalling destruction of the East Wing of the White House disgusting, and somewhat pitiful, desire to put his name all the buildings he sees and build gargantuan gold monuments to himself—testaments to his overweening narcissism and epic bad taste, Trump has been a master at keeping the American people—along with the media—on their heels.

And the man is living the dream—his dream: all the money he can steal, an entire country, and most of the world to bully, and the world’s greatest armed forces to play army with. Trump is like the houseguest who refuses to leave—and why not? I’m sure he must feel like King Midas, that everything he touches turns to gold.

And he’s not about to give that up.

Staying true to form, Trump has done everything in his power to ensure that he will hang onto the presidency, everything from insisting that he will be running for a third term (never mind that this is prohibited by the Twenty-Second Amendment of the Constitution); trying to limit voter eligibility through the SAVE Act, currently winding its way through Congress; the FBI seizure of voting records in Fulton County, Georgia; and the gerrymandering of congressional districts in red states, aided by the appallingly unjust decision by the Supreme Court in the Louisiana v. Callais case, which in effect destroyed the Voting Rights Act.

We’ve seen that this man will stop at nothing to keep his claws on the levers of power. On January 6^th, 2021, he instigated an insurrection of rioters that attacked the Capitol in an attempt to disrupt the 2024 election certification. The crowd not only disrupted the process, but raided offices, unsuccessfully hunted down representatives, destroyed and defaced government property, and assaulted members of the Capitol police. When Vice-President Mike Pence refused to play along, Trump tweeted to the mob that he was a traitor, and cries of “Hang Mike Pence” echoed across the steps of the Capitol.

One hundred and twenty-nine of the rioters went to trial, eighty-seven were convicted, and forty received mixed verdicts. Only two were acquitted, but on the first day of his second term, President Trump pardoned all the January 6^thrioters, even those convicted of assaulting police officers and sedition. It would seem that the president wants to keep on the rioter’s good side. He does have a long-standing relationship with certain of those riotous factions. After the racist demonstrations in Charlottesville in 2020, Trump called for the white supremacist group The Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by”, a statement widely regarded to be a call to arms to protect his presidency; it was less than a year later when many of the Proud Boys showed up at the Capitol riot.

Now, it seems as if the president is trying to pay off or pay his January 6^th army in advance. In a bizarre settlement for his family’s lawsuit targeting the IRS, the Trump administration and DOJ instituted a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund to pay for reparations for those supposedly unfairly targeted by previous administrations.

According the BBC, “eligibility for the fund, on its face, seems extremely broad. In a memo sent to skeptical Republican US senators, Blanche justified the $1.8bn sum because “literally tens of millions of Americans were subjected to improper and unlawful government targeting”.

January 6^th rioters are expecting themselves to be among those compensated. If that proves to be the case, Trump will have paid off his army of mercenaries. According to The New York Times, “Justice Department officials, in the announcement, did not lay out who will be eligible for the money, saying only that it is intended for “victims of lawfare and weaponization” and people wrongly targeted for “political, personal or ideological reasons.” One lawyer who represents numerous January 6^th rioters who say they were unfairly treated says he will be seeking compensation from this fund for his clients. The very sum, $1,776 billion, is coded for the year 1776, which rioters had shouted at the riot as a symbol for the new Trumpian revolution.

Acting DOJ chief Todd Blanche declined to say whether January 6^th rioters would be eligible for compensation, that a council appointed by Trump would decide. One rioter, Andrew Paul Johnson, who had been pardoned by Trump, promised his child sex abuse victim money from his anti-weaponization payout for their silence.

If Trump does end up paying off the rioters and his white supremacist allies, what will he expect in return from them? This is a man who functions almost exclusively on a quid-pro-quo basis. One of Trump’s recurring refrains is—all evidence to the contrary—that the election system is rigged, crooked, and flawed. Would he bring in the Proud Boys to “protect” certain polling places from his alleged fraud? Would he enlist them to try and intimidate voters in certain districts?

The Trump administration has also been trying to commandeer the 2026 midterms. Trump realizes that if Republicans lose control of the House and the Senate, he will have to face possible impeachment, and then, God willing, prosecution. With the help of a specious and incredibly immoral Supreme Court decision disenfranchising African American voters, Republicans, at Trump’s urging, are attempting to redistrict their states. Louisiana has already done so. Alabama is trying, too. South Carolina, to their credit, refused. Texas and Florida had already done so.

President Trump and his policies are so incredibly unpopular (the reasons are too numerous to list here) that they know the only way they can stay in office is to cheat, and cheat big, which is exactly what they’re doing. By either excluding minorities and Democrats from the ballot box or making the process too difficult to handle, Republicans hope to keep themselves in power—to maintain the most corrupt and incompetent administration in the 250-year history of this country intact. That’s something to be proud of.

We the people can stop this power grab. Trump has the money, his private militia, and the backing of the spineless Supreme Court and feckless Republican majority in Congress to help him—or at the very least, not hinder him, but we can beat him with our vote. We need to exercise our right to vote, otherwise we will sink into Trump’s deep, dank, ugly, stinking swamp.

The American people deserve better, and we can serve ourselves—not Trump and his elitist cronies—by standing up and saying no. We did it before, 250 years ago, and we can do it again.