Frontline: "Democracy on Trial" (Kirk Documentary Group, WGBH Educational Foundation, PBS, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, January 30) PBS ran a 2 ½-hour episode of their long-running documentary series Frontline called “Democracy on Trial,” directed by Michael Kirk and co-written by him and Mike Wiser. It purported to be the whole story of the indictments against former President Donald J. Trump but it was pretty much a rehash of the hearings last summer of the House Select Committee on January 6, 2021. Most of the archival film clips were from the committee’s televised hearings, and a lot of the interviewees were participants in the hearings, including former Congressmember Adam Kinzinger and former Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers. Bowers was voted out of office by the voters in his legislative district and Kinzinger voluntarily chose not to run for re-election because he realized it wasn’t worth the bother – two more heads on Donald Trump’s trophy wall of Republicans who disagreed with him and tried to hold him accountable. One of the people I felt sorriest for in the show was Robert Ray, a former Trump attorney, who tried to present the case for Trump’s defense in a calm, reasonable and relatively emotionless fashion – which may explain why Ray is a former Trump attorney. Last Monday, when Rachel Maddow interviewed E. Jean Carroll (whom Trump sexually assaulted in the mid-1990’s and who sued him for defamation and won two judgments against him – the first for over $5 million and the second for a whopping $83.3 million) and her two attorneys, Roberta Kaplan and Shawn Crowley, one of the attorneys mentioned that Trump’s principal counsel in the case, Alina Habba, behaved very differently whether or not Trump was in the courtroom. When he wasn’t, she was a professional, reliable attorney who avoided histrionics; when he was, she went off the deep end with him and, among other things, insulted the judge to his face.

Though the show didn’t mention it, Fox News chose not to cover the House hearings on January 6 and, when asked why, the people in charge of Rubert Murdoch’s “news” network said bluntly that it was because their audiences weren’t interested in seeing it. It’s yet more evidence that the late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was wrong when he said, “Every man is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own set of facts.” America’s media landscape has become so fragmented that people are entitled to their own sets of facts, since the modern age of multiple TV networks and Web sites allows them to absorb only information that agrees with their preconceived notions of what is “true.” It’s been said that had Fox News existed during Watergate, Richard Nixon would have survived politically and served out his full Presidential term. One development since the House committee hearings on January 6 that the show mentioned was Trump’s (and his attorneys’) attempt to get the whole case against him thrown out on the idea that a former President is absolutely immune from any criminal charges against him for things he allegedly did while in office unless he was first impeached by the House of Representatives and convicted and removed from office by the Senate for the same offenses. In this, as in so much else, Trump is following the precedent set by Richard Nixon, who in 1977 matter-of-factly told interviewer David Frost, “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal.”

Nixon was effectively arguing for an American version of the Führerprinzip (“Leader Principle”), the Nazi doctrine that the will of the leader was the ultimate law and he could make anything he wanted to do legal just on his own say-so. Trump is also very much of this mind-set; early on in his Presidency he fired FBI director James Comey when Comey refused to pledge “loyalty” – “loyalty” not to the United States Constitution and the laws he was pledged to enforce, but personal loyalty to Donald Trump. And it was Nixon’s hand-picked successor, Gerald Ford, who established the precedent that former Presidents cannot be prosecuted for things they did in office when he gave Nixon a blanket pardon for everything he did as President just one month after Nixon resigned the Presidency. Every time I hear how unprecedented it is to indict a former President for crimes allegedly committed while in office – including on this show, in which narrator Will Lyman said, “For the first time in American history, a president [was] charged with crimes in office” – I once again curse Gerald Ford and hope he is rotting in hell for the Nixon pardon.

One of the most interesting aspects of this Frontline episode, at least to me, was the sheer number of people who were identified as “conservative” in the chyrons announcing who they were as they made statements critical of Trump: David French, Bill Kristol (once an iconic figure on the American Right), Mona Charen, Gabriel Sterling (the Florida elections official who first warned that Trump’s statements about the 2020 election were going to trigger violence), Charlie Sykes, and perhaps Trump’s most significant critic on the Right: retired judge J. Michael Luttig. It was Luttig, along with former Vice-President Dan Quayle, who convinced Trump’s Vice-President, Mike Pence, that he did not have the loony-tunes “power” Trump and his attorneys, notably John Eastman, said he had to reverse the outcome of the Presidential electors by throwing out slates of electors who’d voted for Joe Biden and replacing them with electors pledged to Trump. In her 1974 book The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits, Mary McCarthy said that among other things, Watergate had been a test to determine who is truly “conservative” – “conservative” in the Edmund Burke sense of believing in the rule of law and in social traditions that should not be reversed lightly or arbitrarily based on the idea that we could do better by radically changing course – and who isn’t. As I’ve read in these pages before, the current six-member majority on the United States Supreme Court is not “conservative”; the six justices, three of them appointed by Donald Trump, are Right-wing revolutionaries committed to making radical social changes in American society (most of which, above all the overturning of Roe v. Wade, are not supported by majorities of the American people).

It’s become obvious that most Americans, especially most Republicans, are not “conservative” in the Burkean sense either; they are committed to a radical restructuring of American society aimed at reversing the liberal gains of the 20th century (the 1930’s and 1960’s in particular) and remaking America into a Christian-nationalist dictatorship. Among the voices of true conservatism on this program was Bill Kristol’s analysis of the dilemma Mike Pence faced on the eve of January 6, 2021: “Pence had just a clear conflict between what Trump wanted him to do and what the Constitution and the rule of law required him to do. I think he'd managed to navigate those conflicts in various ways over four years. Not always, in my view, the right way. But this was such a blatant transgression.” Another voice for true conservatism on this show came from Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger – one of the few Republican politicians who has defied Trump and got away with it, repelling the primary opponent Trump put up against him and being renominated and re-elected – who explained his reaction to the phone call he got from Trump on January 2, 2021 pleading with him to “find” the 11,780 votes that would have “flipped” Georgia from Biden to Trump. “What I knew is that we didn’t have any votes to find,” Raffensperger recalled. “We had continued to look. We investigated. I could have shared the numbers with you. There were no votes to find.”

Former Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers also spoke for true conservatism against the cult of Trump when he said, after Trump appealed to him in on the basis of party loyalty, “For someone to ask me to deny my oath and just let the courts figure it out, or punt it to someone else, is not something I will do. … We choose to follow the outcome of the will of the people. It’s my oath.” And Gabriel Sterling, who recalled that he had been a Republican since age 9 during Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign in 1984, said, “I’ll go to my deathbed knowing that they knowingly lied. They looked in the state senators' eyes, the people of Georgia, the people of America, and lied to them about this, and knew they were lying, to try to keep this charade going on that there was fraud in Georgia.” But given the thug-like behavior of the Trump cultists and the fact that anyone, no matter how low on the totem pole – like Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, who were personally called out by President Trump and his then-attorney, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, on ridiculous charges that they altered the Georgia election results – gets not only vituperative insults but out-and-out death threats, it takes real personal courage to stand up to the Trump thugocracy, and that kind of courage is in tragically short supply in today’s Republican Party.