by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
To understand what’s going on right now with Trump and a looming pandemic on a political level, you have to go back to the origins of MAGA. Something about Obama’s second term freaked angry white Baby Boomers out. They realized, at last, that long-term demographics weren’t on their side and, as such, they grew full of rage. Probably what happened was the Russians noticed this envelopment and began a long-term plot to get Trump in as president. It was probably one of a number of geopolitical ratfucking ideas they had and it just happened to be the one that paid off on a rather massive level.
So, in a sense, Trump is very lucky. He’s a complete moron. A stooge. A pasty for the agenda of our biggest geopolitical foe. But, for the time being, he’s president. The MAGA base is now a death cult. They would rather we all die that admit that they were used in a crass political fashion for the needs of plutocrats and Russians.
This is the point where I say people across the political spectrum are not taking the possibility of a pandemic seriously. While Trump is obviously the most conspicuous and egregious, the center-Left has, the last few days, seen this crisis as an opportunity to score short term political points. You would, too, if a racist misogynist had scream at you at the top of his lungs for about four years.
One person the MAGA base isn’t thrilled with right now is Mike Pence. And Trump knows this, so, he’s hung Pence out to dry by making him the point man for the Trump Administration’s attempt to control a growing pandemic. Now, this is where things may get a little surreal. Given that we’re FINALLY beginning to test across the country, Pence’s attempts to message the base by saying everything is fine may grow rather dated even before their air tomorrow morning. If we wake up tomorrow morning to learn that 20 states have dozens of cases each, then, well, Pence isn’t going to look so great. (The exact chronology of how this might happen is up in the air, of course. But you get the picture.)
Now, the issue is, because Trump is a moron — not the political genius that access journalist Maggie Haberman would have us to believe — when things grow far, far FAR more dire than Trump could possibly imagine and his usual Stormy Daniel bullshit playbook is completely destroyed by, well, the reality that the MAGA base is experiencing, then the whole administration faces an existential problem. What happens then, is anyone’s guess. Or, to put it another way, when someone like Hugh Hewitt or Rick Santorum begin to act more like their 2012 selves again, then, well, Trump is in deep, deep trouble. Whatever those two guys said that would make me drop my jaw in shock would likely mean things have gotten very, very bad across the country. They’ve both invested so much in MAGA — and Trump as a person — for them to finally admit, again, that the sky is blue would likely be extremely surreal.
And it still may not happen. It’s possible that Trump will, again, escape and the Fourth Reich will grow in power and I’ll endup in a ICE death camp wit American Killing Fields as I’ve repeatedly predicted the last few years.
But if things really did get that bad — not that I want them to, mind you — Trump will either finally snap mentally in a rather spectacular fashion, or he will be seen through the lends of normal American politics and his power via the MAGA base will, at last, begin to wilt. A lot of Republicans who have felt a feudal fidelity to Trump will abruptly begin to distance themselves. Given how all-in they’ve been the last three years this event will be mindbogglingly surreal. It will be like returning to earth after three years in space.
And, really, it might even be just a moment in time. A few days until Trump collects his wits and uses the fact that a lot of people are dying as an excuse to consolidate power and we go back to the usual bullshit. My mind almost can’t even imagine how bad the pandemic would have to get for this to happen. Because the next, very, very, VERY late step in the game would be for Trump — if he’s not whipping his cock out and stroking it on TV by this point — to begin to pick people with some actual professionalism to speak for the administration, not political hacks. He would only do such a drastic thing if the usual rules of American politics came back so hard that he realized he wasn’t even going to be seen as a Republican Jimmy Carter. He would, at least, be seen for what he is — a real-life, deranged Chauncey Gardner.
But I really don’t want things to have to get that bad. I have come to accept that Trump is probably going to come after me — and people like me — in his second term and I’m going to die in an ICE camp killing field. If you think that’s just me having “Trump Derangement Disorder,” you can fuck off and eat shit you fucking MAGA fascist.
