Republican politics is like robbing banks.

They steal votes and they'll take your money too.

I’m going to have to start robbing banks if I don’t get more subscribers!

Writing the Newsletter about Roger Stone and the Oath Keepers yesterday reminded me of the day, long ago, when I came to understand what I was doing as a reporter.  I was on the staff of the Village Voice, and over a period of a couple of years, I had developed a talent for investigative reporting. 

I should pause here and tell you what I mean by “investigative reporting.”  The way newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post practice it, investigative reporting is the process by which a reporter gets a whiff of a scandal – say, a local politician is skimming money from the Health and Hospitals Corporation, or a mayor or city councilman is fixing contracts for city services like day care centers or street repair – and the reporter gets on the story and uncovers what’s going on and writes about it.  These stories often involve reams of complicated information and platoons of shady characters and multiple incidents of corrupt behavior, so they are difficult not only to report, but to write.  In many cases, investigative reporters are much better at assembling the facts of their complicated stories than they are at telling them. That’s why many investigative stories, like the one the Times did on Trump’s finances when they got hold of his tax returns, are almost impenetrable and boring to read.

I don’t want to beat my own drum, but I managed somehow to be able to organize  the facts so you could understand them and tell the tale so it was fun to read.

All of which is to set the scene for one day in the early 70’s during Watergate when I turned in an article I had written on Nixon’s Florida pal Bebe Rebozo to the Voice’s editor, Dan Wolf.  He took the pages and leaned back in his chair with his reading glasses perched on his nose and gave it a quick read.  When he was finished, he tossed the piece – it was long, there were probably 20 pages, double spaced – on his desk and turned to me and said, “Well, Lucian, you have certainly figured out how it all happened in these stories of yours.  Now you can spend the rest of your life telling us why.”

I must have looked confused, because he quickly explained that he was talking about motive:  why did a guy like Rebozo become friends with a guy like Nixon and agree to act essentially as his bagman?  Wolf was talking, as he usually did, about the psychological issues involved, and I got that, but I came to realize over time that there was another “why” involved in these complicated stories.  Not only the reason they did it, but why they did it the way they did it. 

In Nixon’s case, he got involved with crooks like Rebozo and made use of the gang of thugs who comprised the “plumbers” for two reasons.  The first was fear.  He was afraid of losing, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that McGovern was a weak candidate and Nixon would beat him in a landslide.  The second “why” was the reason Nixon organized what amounted to an off-the-books intelligence operation that could also serve as a team of undercover criminals and carry out break-ins, like the one at Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate, and the one at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.  He had to do what he wanted done in that way because he needed to commit crimes and ensure that the crimes were not traceable to him.

Trump used Roger Stone for the same reason.  In 2016, Trump was afraid he was going to lose to Hillary Clinton, so he turned to his long- time friend and associate Stone to get down and get dirty on his behalf by associating with the grubby Russian thugs who were hacking the Democrats’ emails.  He needed Stone as a conduit to the Russians so he could ensure that the emails were released at fortuitous times, such as just before the Democratic National Convention and in the weeks immediately before election day.  He knew the Russians were sitting on what amounted to a chest full of political gold, and he wanted it spent the right way, so he dispatched Stone to deal with Assange and Guccifer 2.0, the GRU intelligence agent, and he dispatched Paul Manafort to deal with Konstantin Kiliminik, who was the cut-out to the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who had direct connections the man behind all of the Russian efforts to help Trump get elected, Vladimir Putin.  Trump couldn’t afford to be connected to any of the behind-the-scenes dirty work in his campaign, so he had the two sleazeballs Stone and Manafort do it for him.

This is where Republican politics is like robbing banks.  It was the famed bank robber Willie Sutton who said that he robbed banks because that was where the money was.  The same is true of political bank robbers.  They steal votes because that is where the power is. 

There are two ways to rob a bank.  You can do what’s called a “smash and grab,” in which a single bank robber walks into a small, ill-defended bank in an out-of-the-way small town, sticks a gun in a cashier’s face and says, “give me all of the money in the cash drawer.”  Then he takes the money and runs.  It’s a one-man gig.  He doesn’t need to depend on anyone else because it’s a small operation with a low return on risk. 

The second way to rob a bank happens when you need more money, so you target a big bank, and in order to hold up the bank and get the larger sum of money kept in the vault, you need accomplices.  You need a guy to subdue the guards and the customers.  You need a guy to hold the cashiers and other bank employees at bay while you threaten the bank manager and get him to open the vault.  Then all three of you carry the bags of money outside and the get-away driver effects your escape.

Trump started robbing the nation’s politics as a smash-and-grab lone operator when he identified Obama’s birth certificate as his issue and started telling his first Big Lie, the “birther” nonsense that he wasn’t born in this country, was probably a Muslim, and wasn’t eligible to be president.  He could do it all by himself.  He didn’t need anyone’s help to tweet, to be interviewed, to give speeches around the country to local Republican party committees and fund raisers.  He used the birther lie to get established in Republican Party politics and raise his national profile so he could rob the big bank as a candidate.

He made use of Roger Stone when he announced for president and had to start doing the nitty gritty business of entering and winning Republican primaries.  Stone had been in Republican politics practically since he was in diapers.  He could handle all that stuff, and if any cheating was necessary, he knew how to do that too.

When Trump started winning, he had to pull in Paul Manafort, because Manafort had run national political campaigns and was an expert at herding delegates at Republican conventions.  He had the chops to help Trump get the nomination, and he did.

But when Trump became the Republican candidate, Hillary Clinton was far ahead in the polls.  Everyone thought it was her turn and she was going to win.

Trump was scared he would lose, so he added to his gang of Stone and Manafort such lesser crooks as Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos and Carter Page and Rick Gates in a full-court press with the Russians to trash Hillary’s campaign by getting her emails and releasing them strategically at key moments when they could do the most damage.  Trump robbed the big bank and on November 7, 2016, Stone drove the getaway car as his boss stole the election and won.

These guys have realized for a long time that they can’t win by walking into the American political bank and writing a check.  They need to steal votes every way they can.  They steal them using voter suppression and voter ID laws and closing inner-city polling places and turning voter registration into a modern version of Jim Crow poll taxes and literacy tests.  But the main way they steal votes is by telling Big Lies.  Convincing white voters that government is against them is a big one.  Telling rural voters that stuff like Medicaid only helps Blacks is another.  Same with talking about “welfare queens.” 

But the biggest Big Lie of them all is racism, the one that ties everything together.  Trump told the racism Big Lie in his birther campaign.  He banged on the racist drum of opposition to Obamacare, as if a program of health insurance for everyone was only going to help minorities.  And after he lost the election to Joe Biden last November, he told the racist Big Lie that voter fraud by minorities was how Joe Biden stole the election from him.  He had his hand in the till of the bank of American votes every step of the way.

Nixon and Trump are classic Republicans, and so was Reagan, albeit in a more genial way.  When Reagan started his campaign for president in Neshoba County, Mississippi, the site of the murders of three civil rights workers in 1964, his smash-and-grab of an all-white audience was all he needed as a symbol of his politics to convince the racist base of the Republican Party to carry him to victory.  In 1984, he enlisted Roger Stone’s friend Lee Atwater as his co-campaign manager.  Atwater was the past master of the “Southern strategy” of using racist code like “welfare” and “forced busing” and “food stamps” and “inner city” to pound Mondale.  The day after Reagan won, Atwater signed on with the political consulting firm of Black, Manafort, and Stone, which was like joining Willie Sutton’s gang of bank robbers.

Atwater went on to run George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign.  He became famous for the racist “Willie Horton” ad, deployed successfully in Bush’s win over Michael Dukakis.  In 1991, unexpectedly suffering from cancer at the young age of 40, Atwater wrote what amounted to a deathbed confession for Life Magazine apologizing for the ad and the “naked cruelty” of his use of racism during his career. “I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most,” Atwater wrote. “But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn't I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn't I pay for an evening with friends?”

The lesson being that even some bank robbers have regrets, although speaking as an experienced observer of these matters, I think I can assure you that we won’t be hearing any cries of conscience from Donald Trump or Roger Stone on their death beds. 

Come to think of it, we didn’t hear cries of remorse from Nixon or Reagan, either, which just goes to show you that real Republicans go to their deaths with their boots on – the boots they bought robbing banks and wore when they stomped the necks of their own voters and those of their opponents all the way up the mountain of power.