Or he makes the transition as messy and complicated as possible and then spends the next 2-3 years building a “lost cause” conspiracy narrative in which he and his followers were victimized by anti-American backstabbers.
I had assumed that Trump’s only plays were wresting power unconstitutionally or leaving the country, but the more I think about it, there’s a third option, which is to actively conspire against the Biden regime, and to build a factory of political toxicity. At first it seems farcical, but then over time, it festers. People forget how awful Trump’s term was; they forget his COVID failures. People instead ask “Why can’t Biden do this or that like he promised?” Then the economic bottom falls out a la late Weimar Germany. You know the rest.
And let’s remember what’s behind the 222 and 232 “no comments” - tens millions of voters.
America isn’t failing because of Trump; it’s really failing because of bad citizenship. Nobody wants to go there - I get that. But that problem isn’t going away.
Just for the halibut I did some googling on how one (I mean, Individual 1) could go about declaring martial law and having the military preside over a re-vote. Surprisingly little info on that particular subject. It’s almost as if the idea is so inconceivable that not many have tried to work it out.
But as far as I could discern, first trump would have to have, like, an actual reason to declare martial law, say by invoking the Insurrection Act because of internal violence. Like he threatened to do against rioting this past summer.
But petty laws and reasons haven’t stopped trump before. So then, even if he was successful declaring martial law, there is no legal or practical mechanism whatsoever to have the military preside over a re-vote. And when you think about it, it would take so much cooperation and coordination on so many levels, national, state and local precincts, that it could never really work. It would be much easier for trump to just stage a straight military coup. Maybe try to hold a blatantly phony re-vote that would give it enough of a sheen of propriety to make trumpites happy.
What if…he just ordered martial law without having a valid reason? Meaning, what if he declared an emergency absent of having evidence of one?
Yes, yes - that’s crazy and probably illegal and unconstitutional. Do I think he’ll actually do it? No, it’s highly unlikely. He would have to assume that he would get no resistance from military commanders, and if they resist and refuse, then he has a serious political - and legal - problem.
But he has the power to do it. Such a plan could conceivably succeed. It’s also possible that generals just do what he says because he’s commander in chief.
One thing that we have to start thinking about is that the Republican party isn’t playing by rules. So we cannot rest on the assumption that ‘because the rules say it is not allowed’ that this ensures protection against an unconstitutional usurpation of power. It’s probably borderline ridiculous to predict with certainty that Trump will order a coup, but it’s not at all unreasonable or ridiculous to fathom the possibility, if not now under Trump then perhaps 4 years from now under another authoritarian-minded regime.
I am confident in predicting that Trump will eventually agree (reluctantly, kicking and fussing) to leave the Oval Office. But I am also increasingly of the opinion that we have 2 to 4 years to preserve liberal democracy in this country. That’s the time frame: 2 to 4 years. Or we’re looking at a radically different country.
The “third option” is almost certainly what happens. The Trumply forces now recognize they didn’t get quite enough prep work done on their road to tyranny by Nov 3 and so came up short; too short to try the Hail Mary of martial law or whatever. They will not come up short next time.
During the Inauguration Trump will be elsewhere holding a noisy live rally and press event to announce his candidacy for the 2024 presidency. Complete with lots of mentions for where people can sign up to donate to the cause.
And every day for the next 2-1/2 years until it’s time to get serious about campaigning for the primaries he’ll and his backers will be in a full court press to keep at least the RW side of the narrative all about his successes and promises and the abject failures of both mainstream government (what’s left of it) and the D’s in power specifically.
It’ll all amount to one giant calling-out of the R party. By 2024 it’ll be the T party in fact even if it’s the R party by formal name.
Late add: By 2026 there’ll be a full slate of T-allied candidates for Congress, governor, and the state legislatures. This bandwagon has some very powerful forces behind it, both in the population at large and in the more hidden halls of power.
It would mean that democrats can continue to campaign against him, it may help out in the 2022 elections if Trump is still the voice of the Republican party. It might help keep Democratic turnout high, which has historically not been the case in mid-term elections.
Or it may not. I just consulted my Magic 8 Ball, and it told me that the future was unclear.
I think it’s important to view modern American politics not just in terms of parties but as two ideological forces (with some internal differentiation on each end, naturally). One one end, there is illiberalism; on the other, there is pluralistic democracy.
Illiberalism makes room for the proposition that America need not necessarily be governed democratically, that it can exist as something else entirely. It makes room for the idea that America can exist as a constitutional republic in name, but something else in reality. People who support this view do so with the implicit, and increasingly explicit, understanding that their vision of an American state may not be possible in a system of pluralistic, inclusive democracy, and that a range of tools may be necessary to achieve and preserve their desired order. It’s important to reckon with the fact that this is not crazy talk; this is a viable political alternative to what exists now. It’s morally repugnant to us, but to those who subscribe to this view, and there may be as many as 74 million who do, it’s equally repugnant to live under a kind of oppression in which they are outnumbered by people who do not understand America’s origins, and what America was intended to be all along - until cultural back-stabbers and traitors capitulated to liberalism and allowed America to morph into something unholy.
This is a very real worldview, and this is the reason why they justify living in an unreal “reality.” This reality of inclusive, fact-based, academic democracy wasn’t something they or their forebears consented to; it was somehow signed away, buried in some kind of fine print they didn’t see.
He should sell tickets instead of soliciting donations. Tickets are just paying people to seem him, a private citizen, so is income to him. “Donations” would be subject to some degree of oversight, so more difficult for him to use them to pay off his $400M debt.
I was guilty of using the terms R and D as refering indirectly to those two ideas, inapt as those terms have become.
The forces of illiberal democracy-in-name-only-if-even-that are not accurately described as “the Republican party”. But for a lot of reasons both fair and foul, that is the banner that crowd will march under unless and until a different banner better suits their needs.
IMO the authoritarians are about halfway through the transition. The label “Republican” continues to be a useful skin, but it’s increasingly just camouflage, not the muscle and sinew which has recently been largely replaced. As was the brain a decade or two ago. Once the skin fits badly enough it too will be sloughed off.
At which time the new monster will be fully in view. We can only hope they jump the gun on the reveal and enough decent people recoil at what they’ve unwittingly unleashed on our country.
Apparently Trump called Georgia Governor Kemp today to directly badger him to convene a special session of the legislature to overturn the certified election results and award Georgia’s electors to Trump. He’s not even attempting to be subtle anymore, he’s just straight out telling allies to award the election to him. Kemp apparently refused him, so I guess we have that going for us.
With a presumably safe Democratic nomination for Abrams, that would be the time for Democrats to vote for Kemp over the Trump alternative in the primary. I think it’s the only way to keep the Trump candidates off the ballot.
Hmmmm. Would that be a good thing or a bad thing? Good, because there becomes a sane right wing voice to point to and evaluate issues, or a bad thing because there becomes a sane right wing voice to listen to. And there’s still an insane voice, made more insane by its gravelly voice.
This is one of the things that have been normalized that really scares me. First, people begin to accept that it’s ok to hyperbolicly comment so-and-so should be shot. Then they begin to accept it’s ok to anonymously threaten death to whomever does anything you don’t like. Next, we get people ranting on social media that “something has got to be done!” Along come the folks who think anonymous threats aren’t enough, and start physically “protesting” outside their homes and places of work, and following them around. Soon we have actual plots by people to kidnap and “try” the offenders in private kangaroo courts.
You say, “Oh, that’s only a handful of crazies, most people won’t stand for it.” But how bad does the underlying social and political mindset as a whole have to be for this level of crazy to start amassing followers, rather than one-off loonies in their vans? What comes next, as only a small step?
We’ve moved from phone threats to hanging nooses, anonymous phone calls to videos posted on the web, armed “protesters” storming federal buildings.
Real violence is next. Actual assaults, groups of people physically attacking their targets.
And it’s not just conservatives at fault. Liberals have contributed their share of increasing the hostility, from doxxing to going to political rallies for their opponents to “counter protest” by engaging in confrontation and verbal assault, leading to physical altercations. Wishing harm on teenagers for being Trumpers.
The demonization of your opponents is contributing to the rise in hostility and the acceptance of greater and greater levels of physical manifestation of that hatred. It makes it easier to justify stronger acts.
This normalization of hatred is scary. People are already being run over by cars. Next will be shootings - oh wait, we’ve seen that, too. Next will be actual riots - not a crowd of upset and unruly people doing some vandalism and looting, and throwing objects at police. I mean the Trumpers who have already driven through protests shooting paintballs and pepper spray marching into crowds of BLM supporters to bust heads, and actions like the Charlottesville episode occur, but widespread and repeating across the country.
But also, the casual acceptance of harming opponents, like Trumpers going after Republican poll workers who just do their job correctly. It won’t be long until there are killings in these kinds of situations. They will self-justify as “standing up for the truth” or “protecting justice” or “patriotic duty”.
Some of the people who aren’t sufficiently alarmed by what’s happening assume that the alternative to liberal democracy is dictatorship, but there are alternatives in between. In fact attempts to undermine liberal democracy might actually include attempts to reward some voters at the expense of others in illiberal democracy.
This is consistent with the worldview of people who subscribe to Trumpism. A lot of those who support Trump voted for him because they live in a zero-sum world, and they believe that there are winners and losers. People who voted against global trade did so because they are not convinced that trade can spread benefits to different groups; they conclude that someone wins and someone loses. The same for immigration policy.
This is also why centrist democrats have lost their appeal and why extremism on both the right and the left has become, and will continue to be, increasingly appealing. If we take a nuanced view on things like globalization and immigration, liberals would acknowledge that there is displacement and then offer remedies (i.e. affordable retraining, expanding the social safety net, etc). This is the response that is probably best for everyone, but it’s complicated and messy. It’s a shotgun approach, and it’s not easy for the average person to see how it restores the sense of loss in a town that, say, lost its factory that employed half the adult workers there.
A toxic right wing populist offers the solution: a government that functions as a democracy – but a democracy that proposes tilting democracy in their favor, at the expense of those who “stole” from them, who made gains while their tribe suffered loss.
What I describe above is essentially taking an ecological/psychological perspective: it’s the view of relative deprivation, a sense that there was an America that once worked for people like me but that this America was sold out to “others” who took something away, and this was the fault of liberal democracy.
Liberal democracy proposes that we legislate in the pluralistic interests of all, including meeting the interests of minority populations within the larger whole. However, the brutal reality is that this is a relatively recent proposition. Not everyone can accept this. If you are white and if you subscribe to the zero-sum worldview, then the model of America that you prefer is clear: it’s more advantageous to have a system that takes care of you and yours first. Never underestimate the appeal of this system.
Now we might wonder, how could Trump pull support from Asians, Latinos, Blacks, and women? Those in these groups who voted for Trumpism did so believing that they have their own grievances and they identify with Trump in ways that might surprise us. They also don’t believe that they will be the victims - they might have white friends. They also, like the German Jewish nationalists in Weimar Germany, might have wealth that innocculates them from perceived persecution Germany. History teaches us that this situation can change - with terrifying speed.
My conclusion, sadly, is that the USS Constitution has hit an ice berg, and it is now taking on water. We just don’t realize it yet.
You’re saving me a boatload of typing and doing a better job than I ever could. Bully!
There are a heck of a lot of people from plutocrats to bureaucrats to plumbers to policemen who are saddling up a tiger, confident they’ll be one of the few to ride it successfully. Meanwhile the other half of the country is shouting “But it’s a tiger! Don’t you get that??!!1!!”
