Republicans already got away with treason 4 times — but they won't this time

Republicans have gotten away with it four times now, in a big way. Each time it was because Democrats didn’t realize — until it was too late — the crimes the GOP was willing to perpetrate just to seize and hold power.

This time, for the first time since 1968, it may be different.

In August of 1968, President Lyndon Johnson and Vice President Hubert Humphrey negotiated an end to the Vietnam War with both the North and South Vietnamese. Humphrey was running against Richard Nixon for president in that year’s election and planned to announce the deal in September or early October. He was running ahead and would’ve easily won the presidency with the peace deal.

Unfortunately, Nixon learned of the deal. His people reached out to the corrupt South Vietnamese administration and promised them riches if they’d refuse to go to Paris and sign the peace deal as planned. The FBI had been wiretapping the South Vietnamese and intercepted one of the conversations and handed it over to LBJ.

President Johnson called Everett Dirksen, the head of the Senate Republicans, and pointed out that Nixon was trying to “commit treason.” Dirksen agreed and promised that he’d reach out to Nixon to try to stop it. He failed, and Nixon went ahead and sabotaged the peace deal, leading to another ~24,000 American and ~400,000+ Vietnamese deaths before Jerry Ford ended the war in 1975.

Johnson told Dirksen that he didn’t want Americans to know that Nixon was committing treason to become president because he was afraid it’d shatter our faith in the American system; Dirksen agreed, and the secret went to their graves, only to be revealed to the public 25 years later when the LBJ library published the audiotapes of their conversations.

If Democrats had known, they could have shown up in the streets and stopped Nixon, but LBJ didn’t think there was enough time (he was probably right; Nixon would have just denied it and claimed it was a political hit job, fake news). So Nixon became president and, with his appointments of justices Harry Blackmun and Lewis Powell to the Supreme Court making it majority Republican for the first time since the 1930s, changed the course of American history.

Then it happened again.

In November, 1979, Iranian “students” took the US Embassy and its staff hostage. Two months later, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr was elected prime minister of Iran on a platform of “release the hostages and normalize relations with the United States.” President Jimmy Carter reached out to Bani-Sadr and the two of them began the process of organizing the release of the hostages.

As Bani-Sadr later told The Christian Science Monitor after he fled to America, that year Ronald Reagan was running against Carter for the White House and his campaign reached out to the mullahs, who were the real power base in Iran, and offered them a deal. They had all this US-manufactured military hardware the Shah had bought and they desperately needed spare parts and compatible missiles; Reagan would help cement the power of the radical new regime by selling them the weaponry they needed if they’d just help him become president by hanging onto the hostages until after the election.

Carter and Bani-Sadr knew the mullahs had suddenly turned against releasing the hostages but didn’t learn until 1981 that it was because the Reagan campaign had committed treason to humiliate Carter and win the 1980 election. Reagan became president, illegally sold the Iranians weapons for the next five years (Iran/Contra), and used the money to illegally fund neofascists in Central America. He then declared war on unions, cut taxes on the morbidly rich, cut education funding, and flipped us out of the New Deal that had built the American middle class, leading straight to today’s widespread poverty and oligarchy.

The hostages were released by the mullahs on January 20, 1981 when Reagan put his hand on the bible to be sworn into office — to the minute — by way of sealing the deal.

If Democrats had known before the election, they could have shown up in the streets and stopped Reagan, but nobody learned even the rough details for a year, and it wasn’t until former Texas Lt. Governor Ben Barnes made his confession to The New York Times in 2023 that we finally got solid confirmation from an American source. Reagan’s treason and 1980 election theft, then 43 years in the past, became a one-day story.

And then it happened again.

In 2000, Bill Clinton’s Vice President, Al Gore, was running against Texas Governor George W. Bush and the election was such a squeaker that it all came down to one state: Florida. Which was then run by George’s brother, Governor Jeb Bush.

Jeb ordered his Secretary of State (and the Florida head of George Bush for President) Katherine Harris to obtain a list of mostly-Black and Hispanic felons from George’s Texas penal system and run it against the Florida voter roll. The result was at least 10,000 — and by some estimates as many as 70,000 — mostly Black voters purged from the Florida voter list and unable to vote.

As a result, George W. Bush won Florida — and the presidency — by 537 votes. George’s father’s appointee to the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas (whose wife was taking interviews for positions in George’s White House), was the deciding vote on the US Supreme Court to ignore/violate the 10th Amendment and stop the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court (which would have revealed how Jeb/Harris had rigged the election).

If Democrats had known at the time, they could have shown up in the streets and stopped Bush, but nobody learned even the rough details of the GOP election rigging for several months when BBC reporter Greg Palast broke the story to an international audience and, a year later, a recount done by a group of newspapers found that Gore would, indeed, have won the recount.

All of which brings us to today.

Trump is openly trying to rig this fall’s election, as multiple mainstream outlets have documented. He’s put “election deniers” willing to commit crimes against democracy into critical positions, crippled the two offices in the Executive branch responsible for election integrity, ordered the Post Office to refuse to carry ballots in Democratic-run states with mail-in voting, is positioning ICE agents to intimidate voters, launched a national gerrymandering campaign, and has a handful of other threatened sleazy actions.

Republicans want to outlaw married women voting if they haven’t gone before a judge to change their last names (the SAVE Act), and Trump is trying to build a national voter database — in defiance of the Constitution — so he can help Red states with Blue cities purge their Democratic voters.

Unlike with Nixon, Reagan, or Bush, however, this time we know. We can see this coming. They’re doing much of it right out in the open. And that’s a huge advantage that we all must prepare for.

If it’s true that Trump became president in 2016, as Robert Mueller’s investigation found, because of major help from Putin, then the last legitimately elected Republican president who didn’t commit or at least flirt with treason was Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-1961).

By coincidence, he was also the last Republican president to reject the influence of America’s oligarchs and instead kept the top 90% income tax rate on oligarchs and actually worked to increase union membership and expand Social Security.

So, get ready. We know in advance at least some of the dirty tricks they’re going to try to pull. Musk and Zuck spinning their social media outlets; Fox, CBS, and CNN under oligarch’s thumbs; ICE disruption; seized ballots; corrupted mail; and now realistic, highly deceptive AI-generated Republican deepfakes are already appearing in the Texas senatorial election.

It’s going to get worse — these guys are now legitimately afraid of suffering the same fate as Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell (who went to prison) — but, once again, this time we can see it coming.

Forewarned is forearmed.