Donald Trump instigated a war against America’s democracy on January 6, 2021. He and his Republican allies would have crippled America’s democracy that day had his own vice president not refused to be party to the gravest constitutional offense a president can commit—the refusal to relinquish and peacefully transfer the power of the presidency to his duly elected successor.

President Donald Trump’s latest effort to steal the midterms has played out in plain view. His plan was to force states to conform to last minute, untested, and too-late-to-implement vote-by-mail requirements with the inevitable result of disenfranchising thousands, if not millions, of voters. The only thing Trump needed to launch this bomb into November’s elections was the go-ahead from the Supreme Court.

To say that movie producer Jeremy Thomas was British cinema royalty did not quite do justice to his meritocratic, democratic instincts. A brilliant and inexhaustibly creative man, self-effacingly charming and quietly spoken in a world of loudmouths and show-offs, and hypervigilant for new talent, was more like a cross between an entrepreneur, an enigmatically clever and kindly Cambridge don and the movie world’s favourite cool uncle, or maybe cool great-uncle.

War for the sake of vengeance

Among the pleasures of writing a regular column for CounterPunch is the chance to revisit subjects treated earlier. I don’t do it often – there’s always new issues to discuss – but in the present historical circumstances, a reconsideration feels necessary.