Get a Grip, America – and Vote!
We’re one week out from election day – and that’s a good thing. For four years, half of America has writhed in agony because they intensely dislike, even hate the president. As someone who boarded the #NeverTrump train early and finds Donald J. Trump as repulsive as he’s always been, I am politely asking Americans to get a grip and remember to vote next Tuesday (if you haven’t done so already, as I have).
Having a political leadership you loathe is really the definition of a First World Problem, particularly when we’re just seven days away from an election which can – and if polls are to be believed, will – change that leadership. Most people on our little planet would love to have their worst problem to be that they detest their head of government, who can be changed via free and fair elections on a scheduled basis.
Liberals have gotten themselves into quite a lather over worries that President Trump will not leave office even if he loses the election. Let’s get this out of the way now: he will, no matter how much he rage-tweets between November 4 and January 20 of the coming year. There is no constitutional mechanism to do anything else, and I remind that the U.S. military and Federal law enforcement swear an oath to our Constitution, not to any political leadership.
Moreover, today brings news via a Federally funded entity reporting about pushback inside a Federal government organization against President Trump, specifically unhappiness at Voice of America that the White House is attempting to curtail any VOA reports that may be critical of the president. This comes after months of the White House trying to get VOA to toe a Trumpian line, and it’s something that’s inappropriate for the administration to do: VOA is valuable precisely because it does not follow the edicts of the U.S. Government in its reporting. However, a White House that can’t figure out how to bring tiny little VOA obediently to heel does not seem like a gang that can coerce the Pentagon into, say, ignoring election results.
It’s fashionable among liberals to envision all kinds of worst-case scenarios with Trump, usually involving Russia. They seldom note that Germany, run by Chancellor Angela Merkel since 2005, during which she’s become an improbable anti-Trump icon to American liberals, has a vastly bigger problem with politicians, current and former, being on the Kremlin take than Washington, DC does. If you want the worst-case here, I’ll give it to you: it involves a corrupt political leadership in bed with mafias and Moscow, trying to steal as much as they can while stifling democracy, trashing laws, and crushing opposition.
I’ve seen it in action. The stuff of liberal nightmares about Trump existed as Slovakia in the 1990s. This little country isn’t a place most Americans think about, but it merits brief discussion for reasons that will become obvious. The 1990s were a bumpy time for Slovakia, even though the decade’s early years witnessed the peaceful collapse of Communism plus the “velvet divorce” from the Czechs. Democracy arrived in fits and starts, and for most of the decade Slovakia was ruled by Vladimir Mečiar, who served as prime minister three times. Mečiar’s political party was populist and rough around the edges. Its ideology wasn’t particularly fixed and it was really just a cult around Mečiar, who seemed more interested in corrupt deals to get rich than actually governing. He was known for close ties with organized crime syndicates and Mečiar was notable for a friendly attitude towards Moscow, which was not the norm in Slovakia, where memories of Kremlin repression remained fresh.
Mečiar’s thuggish ways alienated other political parties and he got along poorly with the president, Michal Kováč. By the mid-1990s, there was a serious political dispute between the president and prime minister that paralyzed politics in Bratislava. To break the stalemate, Mečiar in April 1995 appointed his crony Ivan Lexa the head of Slovak intelligence (SIS, equivalent to CIA and FBI rolled into one) and Lexa began to bring the pain to the prime minister’s opponents.
On Lexa’s orders, SIS operatives spied aggressively on Mečiar’s enemies, including illegal surveillance and wiretaps. Journalists who asked questions were dealt with heavy-handedly. In late August 1995, to send a message to President Kováč, SIS operatives kidnapped his 34-year-old son, forced him to get drunk, then electro-shocked him and stuffed him in the trunk of a car which they drove to Austria, where they dumped Michal Kováč, Jr. That incident caused scandal that resulted in an unavoidable police investigation.
However, the inquiry was stymied in April 1996 when the lead investigator working the case, Róbert Remiáš, who had uncovered links between mafia hitmen and SIS behind the abduction, was killed by a bomb in his car in Bratislava. Several of the people whom Remiáš had identified as witnesses or participants in the Kováč kidnapping wound up dying under mysterious circumstances in the months after Remiáš himself was murdered.
That this was all the work of Mečiar, Lexa and SIS, with help from their mafia pals, remains legally unproven but is widely believed, based on substantial evidence. Certainly, Western intelligence services have no doubt of their culpability. This would be equivalent to President Trump conspiring with the Director of National Intelligence to kidnap and beat up Hunter Biden, then arrange to murder of the FBI investigator who was unraveling the case, as well as the assassinations of multiple witnesses. Let’s just say we’re not quite there yet.
It will not surprise that Lexa was known by Western security services to have a cozy relationship with the Kremlin. Indeed, his ties to Russian intelligence caused certain Western governments to make it clear to Bratislava that if Slovakia wished to enter NATO and the European Union, as most Slovaks wanted to, such barely concealed links between SIS and Moscow were not acceptable. On cue, Lexa worked with the SVR, that is Russian foreign intelligence, to prevent Slovak accession to both NATO and the EU.
That effort was doomed to fail, not least because Mečiar lost his bid for reelection in September 1998. His once-bright political star faded, permanently. Mečiar’s periodic comeback efforts, one as recently as this year, have proved stillborn. The fall of 1998 witnessed the end of Lexa’s directorship at SIS too, and occasional efforts over the last couple decades to hold him legally accountable for his thuggish tenure as Slovakia’s intelligence boss have been unsuccessful. One prosecution effort, over the 1997 murder of the mafioso and SIS contact Miroslav Sýkora (a suspect in the abduction of Michal Kováč, Jr), has been underway for more than two years and saw Lexa take the stand just last month. Perhaps eventually justice will be served.
Regardless, this story has a happy ending. With help from Western partners, overt and covert, Slovakia purged SIS of criminals and Russian moles and governance in Bratislava gradually got cleaner. In 2004, the country joined both NATO and the EU, to Moscow’s chagrin, and the Kremlin continues its efforts to radicalize Slovaks against the West, unsuccessfully.
Just this month, the Kremlin’s favorite Slovak politician, Marian Kotleba, who espouses nakedly pro-Moscow views on a wide range of subjects, was sentenced to four years in prison for Nazi-flavored human rights violations. In August, SIS oversaw the expulsion of three Russian diplomats – in reality, spies – over visa violations and related espionage illegalities. While Russian intelligence still operates in Slovakia, as it does across Europe, it no longer can rely on SIS and their political masters to be their partners in crime against the West.
Elections change things, even in new democracies like Slovakia, and our coming election probably will as well. In reality, the possibility of American’s increasing Weimarization seems greater than any risk of a Trumpian dictatorship. Our institutions are much stronger than Slovakia’s were in the 1990s, and even Slovaks prevailed against deep corruption, mafias, and the Kremlin. Regardless, get out and vote.