“… Who are the enablers?” Businesses who wanted lower taxes, less regulation, and access to power have enabled the soon-to-be ex-president.

Who has been enabling the president’s actions and the wide swath of damage he has wreaked upon the government– not to mention the damage to the country?

Who are the people who, actively, or passively, helped the president get to the position he has been in for the last four years, and especially yesterday? Before we answer that question, let’s review what happened yesterday.

What Happened Yesterday? A riot.

The soon-to-be ex-president has been promoting a “wild” rally in the capital for weeks. He has been saying the election was “rigged” for months– well before mail-in ballots were even solicited. He lied to everyone about the role the Vice President could play in front of Congress yesterday– and called him a coward when Mr. Pence gave a written statement that he couldn’t and wouldn’t play that role.

When the crowd assembled– many people, possibly hundreds of thousands– he gave a speech just before Congress was to meet to ceremonially confirm the decision of the Electoral College. In that speech, he repeated the same lies he has been telling for months.

Instead of his promised “facts” about alleged fraud and illegal voting, he rehashed a litany of debunked conspiracy theories and wrong statistics. He repeated the canard that the election must have been stolen because so many Republicans thought it was stolen– ignoring the fact that he was the one who had been telling them all along that it would be stolen.

He told the crowd that, if Vice President Pence had the courage, he could simply invalidate the results of the Electoral College unilaterally. He said that the Congress was getting ready to complete the process of “stealing” the election from him and had to be stopped.

He told them to march down Pennsylvania Avenue and make sure that the Congress didn’t certify the votes of the Electoral College. He told them to be “strong”; he said that his own Vice President (who had wisely and publicly concluded that he had no power to abrogate the Electoral College’s conclusion) was “weak” and a traitor to his cause.

So the crowd walked down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol Building and entered it, as easily as you please. The police were unprepared for the pressure of the crowd– they were undermanned and underequipped, almost by design. They were so undermanned that they would not have been able to stop them without shooting, which they were loath to do because many had friends in the crowd (and there were no Black or Brown people to shoot at.)

It took six hours for the Capitol police, reinforced by hastily called-up FBI SWAT teams, city police, officers from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF), and several other agencies, to clear the Capitol. They were so undermanned that they couldn’t arrest anyone because they didn’t have enough officers to keep arrestees under control (at least that’s what they said.)

Who done it? (who made it possible?)

So who is responsible for the behavior of the President of the United States? Who has enabled his five-year reign of lies? Who allowed him to incite a riot? (Seriously, all the elements of the offense are there; it only takes a courageous prosecutor to assemble them and present the facts to a jury.)

It was business leaders who contributed money to all of the Republican PACs that enabled him to pay for all his publicity and his thinly disguised bribes. It was business leaders who paid for the mailers soliciting more money from individual Republican voter/donors. It was business leaders who decided that televising his rallies in full was good for TV’s bottom line. It was business leaders who wanted what he had to offer: a plan tailored to suit the interests of every billionaire and would-be billionaire– tax cuts for the rich and corporations, fewer pesky business regulations, conservative business-favoring judges, and hollowing out government agencies meant to keep business honest.

Here’s a quote from Andrew Ross Sorkin, a business reporter for the New York Times, in an article on January 7, 2021, about who is responsible for the money that has supported the soon-to-be former president for the last five years:

Yet in this moment when our democracy is under siege, important questions must be asked about business leaders who enabled Mr. [redacted] and, in turn, share some degree of responsibility for the disgraceful acts that took place in Washington yesterday.

And there were many enablers — educated, smart, articulate, often wealthy people who were willing to ignore Mr. Trump’s threat to democracy in the name of economic growth, lower taxes, lighter regulations, or simply access and proximity to power.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/business/dealbook/capitol-mob-enablers.html

These business people who held the purse strings and made the decisions are responsible for the mess we are in now. They made it possible for the man who will not be named to ride down the golden escalator and speak to a crowd who was paid (reportedly $50 a head) to listen to his seditious lies as he launched his candidacy for president.

These are the people who most need to be held accountable, and are least likely to suffer in the slightest from the deadly riots yesterday in our capital. One woman was shot dead by police while trying to break into an interior room in the Capitol Building– she should have known better; she was a combat veteran who should have been at home with her husband no matter how much she disagreed with the politics of Joe Biden. Three other people died in “medical emergencies”, meaning they may have suffered fatal heart attacks from the chaos and excitement yesterday.

Stephen Schwarzman, head of Blackstone, is one enabler.

All of these people’s blood is on the hands of the soon-to-be ex-president and his enablers– and they know who they are. Many of them are already furiously trying to cover their tracks.

Here’s a quote from Stephen Schwarzman, the 73-year-old cofounder and CEO of the Blackstone Group, a ” private equity alternative investment management firm” (Google). Mr. Schwarzman was one of the soon-to-be ex-president’s “most ardent backers and confidants on Wall Street” (New York Times). This statement was quoted from the above article in the Times:

The insurrection that followed the president’s remarks today is an affront to the democratic values we hold dear as Americans. I am shocked and horrified by this mob’s attempt to undermine our constitution.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/business/dealbook/capitol-mob-enablers.html

I think he would have better said, “I am shocked, shocked to find that there is gambling going on in there.”

^{_{[For non-Casablanca fans, that’s what the police captain said when he was asked why he was shutting down Rick’s Saloon… then he was handed his evening’s winnings, which he had received as a slightly disguised bribe from Rick, and said, without evident surprise, “Oh, thank you.”]}}

(photo by Andrew Martin courtesy of pixabay.com)