When you think about pro-Trump Republican House members who are a threat to American democracy, what names come to mind? Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Devin Nunes, Matt Gaetz, Mo Brooks, Paul Gosar, Lauren Boebert? Maybe Kevin McCarthy? There’s one who should be on the top of the list, and he hasn’t gotten nearly enough attention: Scott Perry of Pennsylvania.

Earlier this month, the Senate Judiciary Committee released a damning report on Donald Trump’s treacherous effort to enlist the Justice Department in his scheme to subvert the 2020 election. The report, which garnered a few headlines, is a chilling and detailed read. A president defeated at the polls reached far into the Justice Department to find co-conspirators who would help him overturn the results. He didn’t ultimately succeed, but he did locate at least one senior Justice Department official willing to join his seditious cabal. And Perry played a crucial role in this assault on the Constitution.

After the announced resignation in December of Attorney General Bill Barr, a Trump protector who, in the end, would not go along with the Big Lie that the election was stolen, Trump began pressuring the new leadership at the Justice Department—namely, Jeffrey Rosen, who would become acting attorney general, and his top assistant, Richard Donoghue—to initiate investigations of the election, file lawsuits, and declare the results “corrupt.” There were repeated calls from Trump to Rosen and Donoghue and meetings in the Oval Office.

Rosen and Donoghue would not collude with Trump. Yet another top department official did. That was Jeffrey Bossert Clark, the acting assistant attorney general for the department’s civil division. After meeting with Trump, Clark, who officially had no role at the department regarding election matters, pushed Rosen and Donoghue to announce the Justice Department was investigating election fraud and urged them to tell legislatures in swing states where Joe Biden had won that they should appoint alternate slates of electors. He also informed Rosen and Donoghue that Trump was considering appointing him acting attorney general, should they not accede to these requests.

This was a moblike move to muscle the Justice Department and a moment of tremendous peril for the republic. And Perry had helped engineer it. He had recruited Clark into Trump’s conspiracy.

Perry, a retired Pennsylvania Army National Guard brigadier general who was elected in 2012 to represent a Republican district that covers Harrisburg, is a member of the House Freedom Caucus, an assembly of the most cultish Trump supporters. After the election, he, Jordan, and other caucus comrades considered how they could rig the post-election vote certification process in Trump’s favor. At a December 21 meeting in the White House, Perry, Jordan, and others huddled with Trump to strategize how to do this. By this point, it was clear to Trump that the current leaders of the Justice Department were not going to aid and abet his plot against America. And somehow—it’s not publicly known how—Perry hooked Trump up with Clark. On December 23, Clark was conniving in the Oval Office with Trump and Perry. (Clark’s meeting with Trump violated the Justice Department–White House contacts policy that specifies which White House officials can communicate with which Justice Department officials and how these communications can occur, according to the Senate Judiciary Committee.)

Over the next 11 days, Clark, a member of the conservative Federalist Society, continuously pressed Rosen and Donoghue to bend to Trump’s will. And he kept hinting that if they did not, Trump would fire them and name Clark acting attorney general. He told Rosen and Donoghue that he wanted a classified briefing regarding a nutty conspiracy theory that China hacked a voting machine through a smart thermostat, and he proposed that the Justice Department send a letter to the political leaders of Georgia and other states urging them to convene special legislative sessions to appoint different slates of electors.

Simultaneously, Perry phoned Donoghue and leaned on him to investigate phony election fraud claims, noting that Trump had asked him to call and that the president believed the department was not doing its job with respect to the election. Perry referred to Clark as someone “who could really get in there and do something about this.” That is, Perry was squeezing the department to hand this matter to an official in cahoots with Trump to overturn the election results.

The Trump-Perry-Clark conspiracy was intense. On December 31, Trump summoned Rosen and Donoghue to the Oval Office for a contentious meeting and demanded to know why the Justice Department had not “found the fraud.” He told them that people were saying he should fire them both and install Clark. But when it became clear on January 3 that such a move would lead to mass resignations at the Justice Department, Trump’s plan fell apart. And Trump, Perry, and the other plotters ran out of time.

With his behind-the-scenes skullduggery, Perry nearly orchestrated a full-fledged constitutional crisis. Had Rosen and Donoghue not held the line—had other senior department officials not threatened to resign in protest—Trump and Perry might have succeeded in forcing the department into falsely declaring the election results fraudulent. That would have made the post-election stretch far more dangerous. While Jordan, Gaetz, and other Trump loyalists were all over social media and Fox falsely braying about a stolen election and championing BS conspiracy theories and charges, Perry was quietly working in the corridors of power to sabotage democracy and serve an enraged authoritarian who was desperately seeking to retain power. And Perry came close. When the Senate committee released its report detailing his role, he refused to comment. (Hours after the Trump-incited insurrectionist attack on the Capitol, Perry led the GOP effort in the House to block the certification of electoral votes from his own state. Condemning this “attempt to disenfranchise his own constituents,” the York Dispatch, a prominent newspaper in his district, called on Perry to resign.)

Perry’s participation in the Trump-Clark conspiracy shows he is far more dangerous than the average Trump bootlicker. The January 6 House committee ought to grill him. And he ought to be watched closely.

Got a comment on this item—or anything else? Tips? Leads? Email me at thisland@motherjones.com.

The Watch, Read, and Listen List

Squid Game. By now, the odds are that you have heard a lot about this new Netflix series from South Korea—or have watched it. This nine-parter has become a global phenomenon and the streaming service’s most-watched show ever—and could become the most viewed piece of content in human history. (We’re talking video content, not the Bible or the Qur’an.) You probably know the gist: Hundreds of indebted people are recruited to play a series of childhood games—with deadly consequences for the losers—as they compete for a big payoff of about $40 million. As they struggle through these life-and-death contests, 1 percenters (who look like rejects from Eyes Wide Shut) bet on the action. The show, creepy and violent, is well executed: good writing, good acting, good pacing. Though the series scores high on the implausibility scale—Where do the guys running this operation in a Bond-like lair find hundreds of henchmen? Who constructs the elaborate game sites? How could this go on for years without detection? What are the economics of all this? —the intricate interactions of the main characters feel painfully real. The show nails an essential element of drama by presenting perilous and complex situations and compelling a viewer to ask, What would I do? The choices are excruciating.

The final episode casts the series as a contemplation on human nature: Is it good or bad? But this does the series a slight disservice. My hunch is that its wide appeal stems from how it addresses a slightly different subject: Are we better off working with others or looking out for No. 1? The answer is not always obvious in this dark show. And there’s another intriguing aspect to the series. What makes the whole Squid Game set-up possible is that South Korea has for years been racked with a personal debt crisis, and it has worsened in recent months. The players are each in desperate straits due to their own debt. Consequently, they calculate that their chances in the win-or-die world of the games are better than “out there” in capitalism-driven Korean society writ large. Remember Parasite, the Academy Award–winning South Korean flick? The fellow living in the sub-basement was hiding from his merciless creditors. I doubt it’s a coincidence that two of the biggest cultural sensations out of South Korea—not counting K-pop—have each been propelled by the personal ravages of debt. Unless you’re easily prone to nightmares, Squid Game is worth betting on.

Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia by George Makari (W.W. Norton). In 2016, George Makari, a psychiatrist and historian, was pondering what he should write about for his next book. He had previously produced well-received volumes on the creation of psychoanalysis and on the development of the concept of the mind during the Enlightenment. He was stuck—until Donald Trump became president and a particular term became prominent in the news: xenophobia. Makari was intrigued by the history of this concept. And he did what one does in such a situation. He googled. He found the easy definition: the fear and hatred of strangers. But, Makari writes, “unlike anti-Semitism or racism or homophobia, xenophobia seemed to have no history.” It was an abstract construct, assumed as an immutable given. And he came to realize there was something else different about it: “In speaking of anti-Semitism or Islamophobia or homophobia, we name the maligned group, while those who do the discriminating remain otherwise undefined.” Xenophobia, on the other hand, “directs our attention to the source of the trouble”—that is, the one who fears, not the one who is feared. It’s an engaging turnabout to consider this harmful attitude in such a fashion. Xenophobia is not about them; it’s about us.

The dread of strangers has long existed within humanity, but in Of Fear and Strangers, Makari explores how xenophobia has been regarded in the past and present. And his journey is especially trenchant when he examines the notion that xenophobia is a natural and necessary human instinct. Fear and aggression toward outsiders are common throughout the animal kingdom. Children experience stranger anxiety. It’s all hard-wired, right? Not necessarily, Makari contends in this wonderfully erudite and elegantly written book. Humans could evolve out of small roving bands only by learning how to get past the fear of others and finding ways to manage conflict with outsiders. This is how “small tribes merged into larger populations, capable of food surpluses that allowed for stratification and technological progress,” he writes. We won because we conquered fear: “Humans meet strangers, form couples, families, larger tribes, and new nations. In these emerging structures, xenophobia is hardly an advantage. In fact, it is perhaps the most destabilizing kind of disaster.” That’s a poignant and pointed lesson for today.

Got a recommendation for the Watch, Read, and Listen List? Email me at thisland@motherjones.com.

Rock ’n’ Roll Flashback: The Young and Angry Elvis

Regular readers of this newsletter know I occasionally sprinkle in reminiscences of what I like to think of as my “rock ’n’ roll days”—the years when I covered the advent of punk and new wave, played in a band, and attended a mess of shows. So far, I’ve recounted witnessing one of the first Clash concerts in the United States (and being driven to it by a punk on acid); interviewing the Police after hearing Sting and his fellow band mates screaming at one another; getting slugged by Iggy Pop; and being serenaded in the rain by Bruce Springsteen (well, sort of). The other day, I was rummaging through some old photos and came across the two shots below. I took these pics at an Elvis Costello show in Providence in February 1978. That was a few months after the release of his debut album, My Aim Is True. Costello is one of the few artists who I can recall hearing for the first time. I was driving in my parents’ car, and WNEW-FM in New York City played “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes.” It had a punkish attitude, but it wasn’t punk. It had a new vibe, but it wasn’t new wave. Within days, I had the album. (The same thing happened about that time with this crazy-sounding band called the Talking Heads.) Once I had the chance to see Costello, I was there. And I was there early and ended up in the front of a boisterous crowd and pressed against the stage. My recollection is that Costello hit the stage looking damn angry; he and his band, the Attractions, opened with “Pump It Up,” and he fiercely ripped through about a dozen songs with no banter. Boom, boom, boom—he was done in about 45 minutes and then came back for one encore and stormed off as if we would never see him again. It was a short set, but filling. I was exhilarated and exhausted. Costello looked as if he had sweated off several pounds in less than an hour. This isn’t much of a story, I know. But it is a performance that I can still remember—and feel—all these years later.

©David Corn

Have your own old rock ’n’ roll photos or memories to share? Email them to me at thisland@motherjones.com.

Read Previous Issues of This Land

October 16, 2021: Crunch time for Merrick Garland; Bannon, QAnon, and the Virginia governor race; Dumbass Comment of the Week; the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

October 12, 2021: How Donald Trump betrayed Trump country; one of the best books about survival and isolation ever; the disappointments of The Many Saints of Newark; and more.

October 9, 2021: Can Trump and the GOP be stopped from shoving 1/6 into a memory hole?; how you can join a This Land online salon; the world premiere of Jill Sobule’s new song, “You Better Not F*ck in Texas”; the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

October 5, 2021: The Democracy Crisis: Could this be Joe Biden’s big mistake?; kicking Pat Robertson on the way out; Skyfall vs. Casino Royale; a Velvet Underground tribute; and more.

October 2, 2021: How we almost got that big Lewandowski scoop; Dumbass Comment of the Week; MoxieCam™; and more.

September 29, 2021: Note to Greta Van Susteren: The road to hell is paved with both-siderism; the value of Netflix’s Worth; a crazy CIA story; and more.

September 25, 2021: What do Common, Leonard Bernstein, and Dwight Eisenhower have in common?; Dumbass Comment of the Week; the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

September 21, 2021: The Trump-Russia scandal denialists are taking another desperate stab at gaslighting you; Netflix’s The Chair nails the assignment; and more.

September 18, 2021: Hey Marco Rubio and Glenn Greenwald, this is the real problem with Milley, Trump, and nuclear weapons; Dumbass Comment of the Week (did Barack Obama really kill rock ’n’ roll with racial politics?); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™ (a new toy!); and more.

September 14, 2021: Will the new Bill-and-Monica television series spur a reappraisal of the Clinton scandal?; a stunning new Holocaust movie you can’t see—yet; one of the best articles ever about a family and its dog; and more.

September 11, 2021: How Trump’s conspiracy theories are killing people in West Virginia and elsewhere; more 9/11 reflections; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Special Confederacy Edition); a look at HBO’s very odd White Lotus; MoxieCam™; and more.

September 8, 2021: 9/11 plus 20: a remembrance and a thank-you; the chilling climate crisis warning in HBO’s Reminiscence; and more.

September 3, 2021: Texas shows how Trumpism has become fascistic vigilantism; Dumbass Comment of the Week; Rock ’n’ Roll Flashback (how I was popped by Iggy Pop); MoxieCam™; and more.