The wonderful Kaitlin Byrd (Dame Magazine) joins me to discuss what the hell just happened on January 6, 2025.
Edited excerpts from our conversation:
SER: Welcome, and how are you, Kaitlin?
KAITLIN: I have been better. You know, I really, really have.
At the day of this recording, it is just a little after 24 hours after Democrats just kind of conceded American democracy, in my personal view, without any contestation of the 2024 presidential election, not even on the very good grounds they had to argue that a person who last was here to try to overthrow the government probably shouldn’t have been just easily and straightforwardly accepted as victor. doing exactly what he wanted, four years ago.
He interrupted this process in an attempt to make himself dictator. Now that he’s going to be a dictator, they’re just like, “Oh, I guess there’s nothing we can do.”
SER: Democrats objected after Bush v. Gore in 2000, and then after 2004 when there were issues in Ohio. And then after January 6th, it seemed as if the message was, well, any objection is wrong.
KAITLIN: Okay, [Trump had the Big Lie.] The answer from my perspective was for Democrats to go with Big Truth, which is that there is a constitutional provision, and I wrote extensively about it, and I hate that every time I bring it up, I feel like a crank, because I feel like Democrats have treated questioning Donald Trump's eligibility under Section 3 [that way] since Trump v. Anderson, the Supreme Court decision in March of last year, all the way up through then you had Jamie Raskin, Chris Murphy, you had so many people talking about like section 3, section 3, section 3, section 3.
And then all of a sudden the Supreme Court’s like, “Well, you can only do it on the seventh Saturday of the fourth moon.” And [Democrats said], “Well, I guess we can’t do anything now.”
[People] forget that the point of [January 6] was for Donald Trump to assert himself as ruler of the United States. Because if anyone thinks that [he’d do that and] be president the way that all presidents are president … if that were the case, then he wouldn’t have been fighting so hard to screw with the certification.
He was trying to undermine and install himself. And now he’s done so legally with permission because Democrats have allowed it to happen. They have allowed Republicans to dictate the terms of Trump’s return, and that has created the situation where Democrats are now,
They’ve been struggling with this for a long time, but they have now explicitly said that they do not believe that they’re legitimate holders of public authority. They do not have a right to challenge things. They didn’t even think they had a right to challenge Donald Trump. Donald Trump tried to overthrow the government last time we held a certification, and they didn't even feel compelled to say, “Hey, it’s the four year anniversary of you trying to overthrow the government. We’re going to challenge your right to be president of the United States. They didn’t even feel comfortable doing that.
And that is a collapse of a party. Because if you’re not going to wield power, what are you here for?
It drove me crazy [when] on January 20th, 2021, Joe Biden was inaugurated. And as presidents do, he gave a speech. And in that speech, he did not mention that two weeks before someone had tried to overthrow the government.
He did not even mention that this transfer of power, what was happening that day, was an important thing that had been almost derailed by an angry mob attempting to kill or hold Congress under siege. Because that was the plan. The plan was to break certification so it could not happen. So there was no certified president. So Donald Trump could declare that he was still president and thus undermine inauguration. That was the point. That was always the point.
And nonetheless, we ended up with the person who rightfully took power after this horrific … violent struggle because it was not a peaceful transfer of power, no matter what Republicans said during the impeachment: “Well, we eventually got there.”
If your transfer of power has a body count, it’s not a peaceful transfer of power.
I quite literally gave a speech on Saturday from the Lincoln Memorial begging lawmakers not necessarily even to win, but just to try. I really do believe that Donald Trump succeeds because people let him succeed. They would just rather not oppose him and they don’t want to.
SER: We didn’t have the votes. I get that. And something I’ve seen a lot, both in response to you on social media and from a lot of folks amongst theDemocratic Party who sort of absorb this kind of snotty, sneering embrace of norms … they say, “That’s just performative because it wouldn’t work. And to quote a TV show from my youth, Thundercats, the hero saying, “I may lose, but it won’t be because I gave up” is still very important morally to me.
Also, politics is performative. How do you look at the past decade and not see that Republican performance has helped them consistently?
This view that Trump will F something up again — considering that the last time Biden narrowly won because what Trump effed up was a pandemic that murdered people, I would not want to sit back and say, “Hey, well, maybe he’ll invade Canada and then we’ll have some good midterms.” We still won’t win the Senate. Susan Collins will still win re-election in Maine somehow: “How did it happen? Trump bombed Greenland, but she still won.”
I’d like to read you one thing that someone had posted, and I see this a lot on social media: “The time to do something was November 5th and millions of Dems were not worried and stayed home. It is what it is.”
That always frustrates me because the implication is just that Democrats will fight hard battles as long as you have ensured that there are no hard battles for them to fight.
KAITLIN: Yes. And that’s wild to me because the party right now is sitting on top of the political achievements of people who did a lot of fighting — not always clean fighting, some pretty dirty stuff.
I mean, people don’t even think about it, but FDR was a master propagandist. He took advantage of the media of his day to basically flood the zone. “New Deal” was on everything, everywhere, all the time. If a dollar went into something, it had New Deal plastered on it. It was everywhere. He was speaking to people once a week, sometimes more to get people to understand that he was present and listening to them.
LBJ succeeded at the Great Society, succeeded at the Civil Rights Act, succeeded at the Voting Rights Act, succeeded at the Fair Housing Act by taking advantage of tragedies.
He soaked that Civil Rights Act in JFK’s blood: “If you don’t do this, you’ve murdered him again.” He just constantly pushed every button he could to get that done. He threatened people. He blackmailed people. It wasn’t, “We’re gonna play nice politics. And if the Southern Democrats allow us to, we will pass a Civil Rights Act that says you can only kill black people on Tuesdays.“
No, he did actual aggressive work. These successes were built by people who were playing real politics.
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