Category: Tsar-A-Largo

I’m Nervous About The DPRK

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Donald Trump is a big old doofus and as it seems the DPRK may be preparing a new missile test, there’s a chance that they’ve finally realize this as well.

If they did start shooting rockets off and testing H-Bombs again, everything would change pretty quick. And this would be the backdrop to Trump going to war against the Legislative Branch. Leave it to Trump to cause a nuclear war between the United States and the DPRK through sheer incompetence, then turn around and use it as his personal excuse to go full dictator.

You know he would, too. If he managed to bungle his way into a shooting war with the DPRK and they managed to blow up, say LA or NYC or DC, he would likely declare martial law and hunker down for the rest of his life.

I have no easy answers on that one, folks.

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe things aren’t quite as dire as I fear.

This Is America — Mueller, MAGA and Trump As Elected Dictator

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Robert Mueller is a brilliant guy and as such he must know that there’s a good chance any report he sends to Attorney General Bill Barr may be extremely bowdlerize and otherwise hidden forever.

As such, it would make a lot of sense if soon — say Friday — he wrapped up his investigation by indicting a series of high profile, politically powerful people and then walking away. The report itself wouldn’t really matter that much because the crux of the report would be in who he indicted.

Now, let’s be honest — America is so politically divided right now for various reasons — and the economy is strong enough — that Trump is effectively above the law. And it’s likely he will be re-elected handily and we’ll be fighting over his “legacy” in 2024. So I wouldn’t get your hopes up that Trump is going anywhere.

In fact, let’s address that. A lot of Republicans say that all the investigations into Trump is simply warmed over sour grapes and we should simply leave Trump alone. “He won, he’s president, the economy is doing well, fuck off,” is essentially their line of reasoning.

There’s not a lot you can say about that. Though my response is that is only half the story. Trump has done a lot of impeachable things since he became president and as such if you can’t seen past your own partisanship, then there’s not much point debating anything, now is there.

With that in mind, I fear all we can hope for is FOX News simply being quiet for about 24 hours while they process whatever big name indictments Mueller may hand down. That’s it. Then after that 24 hours, they’ll take their cue from Trump’s twitter feed and after about a week of people being angry on Twitter the whole thing will fade and Trump will divide-and-conquer his way to a 2020 re-election.

But I like to play pretend, so let’s step away from the what will actually happen and talk about what won’t happen — Trump actually faces a real existential threat to his presidency.

This is where things get difficult to predict because we just don’t know how far Trump would be willing to go to defend himself. If he simply plays the greatest hits, then he’ll be impeached in the House and acquitted in the Senate. He’ll then turn around and say he’s been vindicated and there will be absolutely nothing anyone can do about it.

But let’s walk even farther away from what will really happen. Three things might change things in unexpected ways. One, if Mueller indicts some really big names, there’s a chance Trump will completely lose it and overplay his hand to such an extent that his support begins to wane a little bit. While the flipping out bit is possible, I just don’t see anything getting him below 37% of the electorate. The scary thing is, even if he does over play his hand with 60% of the electorate, there would be people who got off on that and people would start to die in the streets — or shit might get blown up — MAGA finally gets radicalized to such an extent that it has real bloodlust.

Meanwhile, there’s No Deal Brexit that likely to happen in a few weeks. If the impeachment process has finally begun to pick up steam in the States and suddenly the global economy comes to a grinding halt because of No Deal Brexit, that might push Trump’s support down to anti-Vaxxers, mouth breathing gunnuts and flat-earthers. But, like I said, even then if MAGA has gotten radicalized enough, the violence they inflict might be enough that there is never the political willpower to get rid of Trump, even if his actual poll numbers are in the 20% range.

The last thing I might speculate could pose an existential threat to Trump’s administration is there might come a point either sometime next year or sometime in Trump’s second term, when things get so absolutely bad in real terms that the Republicans do some white knuckled political calculus in their soulless minds and do the PencePiviot.

In other words, they wouldn’t even blink and eye in their move to Pence, saying, “Shut up, libtard, I really voted for Pence in the first place.” But that’s only at about maybe 10% probability. The sequence of events that would lead the Senate to convict Trump should he ever be impeached in the House is so unlikely as to be nearly impossible. Trump’s not going anywhere and there will be a lot of talk in 2023 that MAGA should push for either Trump to ignore the Constitution and run for a 3rd term, or he should push for a change of the Constitution so he can run. The only thing that might reduce that momentum is Trump picked some young, passionate — and competent! — ideological MAGA firebrand as his chosen successor. So, in that sense, we would look back at Trump as simply the bridge between the democratic America of the past and the “managed democracy” of the present and future.

Lastly, let’s play pretend even more. There’s only about a 1% chance Trump will not be a two term president in my opinion. I say this because Trump is an avatar for some pretty massive structural problems in American political life. But let’s say for the sake of argument that the asteroid strikes Planet Trump, then what? I would expect Trump to tweet all day in an extremely passive-agressive manner, to rally MAGA to the White House to physically protect him and for there to be an actual armed, deadly battle on the White House lawn as we figure out how to get Trump physically out of the Oval Office. It would be the most tramatic event in American history since 9/11.

Like I keep saying, however, Trump’s not going anywhere. He’s an elected dictator and things are probably only going to get worse, not better. I have no hope. We’re in a dystopia. This isn’t really a matter of hope as it is simply an observation — no one can predict the future and the deadhand of history always has a few tricks up her sleeve.

America 1776-2019.

RIP.

The Intelligence Community Is Atwitter About Friday Indictments…But What’s Going On?

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I keep seeing chatter from people online about something big happening on Friday vis-a-vis Mueller and inducements. The interesting thing is it’s coming from intelligence community people online.

It makes you wonder what they know and who they think will be indicted. Given the purview of Mueller’s investigation, it makes you think that maybe it’s someone big. Someone really big, like Don Jr. Or maybe even Jared Kushner.

Whomever it is, it would be someone so big that things could come to a head pretty quick. Like, Trump starts to fire and pardon everyone he feels he needs to pardon to survive. One thing is, I continue to think not only has the distance between what the public knows to be true and what the House Democratic leadership is willing to do has grown to an unstable distance, I also believe that the conditions are for actual violence to occur from the Right. I could see a scenario whereby someone whack job blows up, say CNN or The New York Times once the impeachment process begins, then Trump turns around and uses that as some sort of Reichstag Event.

Or, put another way, the country is tearing itself apart in a macro sense, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since before the Civil War. One thing I would like to observe, however — the big difference between the late 1850s and today is the military. If there was some sort of crisis as impeachment began to pickup steam, the ostensibly apolitical military might be the thing that keeps the country together in the end.

Maybe not in the way we would prefer, but they might just do it.

Rather than people leaving the military for individual states like they did during the Civil War, if there was some sort of legitimacy crisis on the part of the Federal government, it’s likely the military would setup a junta of sorts for a few months to let passions subside. That, in fact, might be the really strange manner in which we actually slip out of what seems like a pretty inevitable civil war. The military simply won’t allow that to happen and in exchange, civilian control would end for a time being.

But anyway, back to the matter at hand — whatever may be about to happen, the IC things they have a heads up. For them to be so excited, it probably means someone, somewhere in the Mueller office has been gossiping with the IC.

I still, however, have my doubts that anything at all will drop Friday.

We’ll see, I guess.

The Great Political Conundrum Of 2019

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

We’ve officially entered that strange twilight period in the Trump Era when on the face of it, we know Trump faces some existential threats to his administration, and yet the Democratic leadership of the House is sitting on its hands for various reasons.

The divide between what we know and what Democrats in the House are willing to do politically is beginning to grow so deep and large that whenever things snap back into place, it could be pretty astonishing.

What I mean by this is — while the House Democratic leadership is beginning to look into the vast amounts of crimes and abuses of power on the part of Trump, they continue to wait for the ostensibly “objective” Mueller Report to “force their hand” on the matter of impeachment. For various macro reasons, they feel as though only after the Mueller Report is released can they actively move to impeach Trump.

Alas, I fear that’s going to be quickly seen as quaint thinking soon enough. I have long believed that the moment the House begins to do its job, the political momentum for impeachment will race out the gate. The issue, of course, is about 37% of the electorate — the people who elect Republicans and vote for them in primaries — is so cult-like in their support for Trump that it would be some outside force, not anything that Trump may have done that would ultimately lead to his impeachment and potential conviction in the Senate.

Ultimately, it will be the economy. If No Deal Brexit happens and the consequences of it are as bad as we fear, then that, no anything Mueller may report to Congress, will be what drives Trump out of office.

And that doesn’t even begin to address the cold hard political fact that if Trump’s fate isn’t actively being decided in the Senate by August 2019, we’re going to have to wait for “the people to decide” in 2020. And, as we all know, America is now a corrupt autocratic plutocracy, not a democratic constitutional republic and as such, Trump is likely to cruise to a fairly easy re-election.

If Trump is re-elected in 2020 (which as of now looks like a political absolute certainty) he will likely go full autocrat and pardon everyone he needs to pardon and get his proxies on TV to say, “the people have spoken, they don’t care, let’s move on. Besides, shouldn’t we be at work with Iran by now?”

And, yet, there may come a point between now and August 2019 when a tipping point occurs and there simply is no escaping the absolute need to impeach Trump in the House. The worst case scenario in the Senate being, of course, that they will punt the whole thing and not even take up the articles of impeachment against Trump in the first place.

So there’s a very real possibility that the absolute worst case scenario for all involved is Trump eludes conviction in the Senate, he gets re-elected and then the economy tanks in a massive way…and even though his approval rates drop down to the flat earthers, Qanon believers and anti-Vaxxers, there simply will be no political will to do anything about it and the entire country will grind to a halt for about three years until we start fighting over Trump’s “legacy” in 2024.

What’s worse, should the good guys “win” and Trump be somehow miraculously convicted in the Senate, I believe Trump won’t physically leave the Oval Office without the “assistance” of Federal Marshals. In that case, it would be the most devastating domestic event in American history since 9/11.

I guess what I’m saying is I have no idea what the endgame to all of this is and there are a lot of real nasty ones you can think up. It could be that all things considered our best bet is some sort of extreme version of Iran-contra whereby we all know Trump should be impeached and convicted and somehow that is enough to maybe, just maybe allow a progressive liberal to be elected in 2024. (If we still have elections at that point.)

But if you literally use that as political history roadmap, it’s not exactly all that encouraging — Bush won in 1988 and Clinton only won because of the dead hand of history. Given that the youngest of the Baby Boomers won’t start to die for another 20 years, there’s a good chance it won’t be Trump who finally pushes until to a “managed democracy” like Russia, but his younger, more competent and indological successor.

Idle Mulling On Why We’re Probably Never Getting Rid Of Trump

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

People who are opposed to Trump often times miss some basic facts about modern American political life, chief among them being that as it stands it is nearly impossible to hurt Trump politically in any traditional sense.

In other words, Trump has a base of about 35% and it’s not going anywhere.

Ever.

Trump is so obsessed with placating the CPAC base that what was once MAGA ideology is now bordering on a theology. The distance between Trump literally being an American Fuhrer for that base is, well, pretty finite at this point.

So, I saying that if you sketch out the future given what we have on hand now, we aren’t going to be fighting over impeachment in 2019, we’re going to be fighting over Trump’s “legacy” in 2024.

There’s a pretty good chance that in the end, the whole thing is value free. It’ll be as if Trump never existed. He, of course, is likely to damage basic political discourse in America for the rest of my life, but should a progressive liberal win the presidency in 2024, the now-MAGA “deep state” will do everything in its power to destroy him or her while at the same time former MAGA Republicans will act like everything they did in defense of Trump is “old news and they were just trying to get elected.”

As long as the economy continues the way it is, Trump is a king, an emperor, and elected dictator. For about 35% of the electorate, Trump could literally declare himself God King of the United States and all people like me would get from MAGA is cry-laugh emojis.

The only possible existential threat the Trump Administration faces at this point is something like No Deal Brexit will be sufficient shock to the global economy that Trump will go from a base of 35% to maybe 20%. But even then, Trump’s not going anywhere.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that all our worst fears about Trump could be proven absolutely right AND the economy could collapse and the only way he leaves office before 2025 is Republicans in Congress begin to believe they would have a better chance keeping the executive if Pence was the incumbent.

That’s it. That’s all I got.

Trump’s combination of zero shame, an absolute craven desire to put self-interest ahead of the needs of the nation and the religious devotion of his base is more than enough to keep him in office even if he strangled someone, anyone, in Times Square, married Ivanka, gave the nuclear codes to anyone interested, whatever, you name it.

Trump. Is. Not. Going. Anywhere.

All I can say is I hope the political fates prove me wrong. I really do. But Trump is such an absolute avatar for the feeling of disenfranchisement for a lot of white America that, well, the only reason why I stay angry is I can’t help myself.

V-Log: Trump As Political Avatar

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Some thoughts.

V-Log: My Hot Take On The Fate Of The #MuellerReport

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I don’t believe we’ll ever see the Mueller Report, and if we do, it will be politically moot by that point. In fact, the way things are going, Trump is going to survive and prosper the next 5 or so years and, what’s worse, he is going to lay the groundwork for an even worst Republican president down the road.

Of course, there are some potential curve balls that I simply can’t account for, the chief among them being No Deal Brexit. If that happens and there is a significant shock to the global economy because of it, then there’s at least a chance Trump’s popularity sink down to the 20% of the population who think the world is flat.

But, in a sense, I think Trump will be looked back upon by many in the Republican Party as something of a bizzaro Ronald Reagan in the sense that his “legacy” will be to shift the political center of the country to the Right in a pretty significant manner.

The Ideology Of Radical Resistance

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

It is a tribute to the American temperament that Americans generally are extremely reluctant to radicalize. It’s not like the citizens of Washington D.C. ever rose up and declared an independent commune like the residents of Paris have been known to do on occasion.  And when Americans do get radicalized, it’s usually on a macro level because of outside forces, not because they’re just feeling ornery that decade.

So, when I talk about the formation of a “Radical Resistance,” all I mean is there needs to be an ideological framework for ending the Trump Administration via conventional political means, specifically impeachment by the House and conviction in the Senate. That, at least to me, is what I’m talking about when I say “Radical Resistance.”

And, it’s only “radical,” because, well, right now, nothing’s being done to end the Trump Administration. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada. This, even though we have the Trump Administration dead-to-rights on any number of different crimes against the Constitution.

For me, for there to be effective Radical Resistance to Trump and his MAGA agenda, we have to know what we believe. The only reason, in real terms, there even needs to be a “radical” resistance is, well what we got ain’t working.

First and foremost, to be a member of the Radical Resistance is agree to follow in the tradition of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. As well as the Reconstruction era Radical Republicans. As such the Radical Resistance will use political means necessary to end the tyrannical administration of Donald J. Trump.

I am completely opposed to any form of violence and I want to destroy Trump entirely on political grounds. That’s it. I want him legally removed from office immediately and if you represent me on a local, state or Federal level, if you don’t publicly come out in favor of Trump being lawfully removed from office I won’t vote for you. I’ll support and vote for someone who will.

Additionally, the Radical Resistance should be a united front. We need great writers and thinkers of #NeverTrumpers for the specific purpose of broadening the appeal of the cause for the specific purpose of ending the Trump regime. After we get that goal, we can go back to bickering about stupid shit on a policy level. You may hate his policies, but if you could get George Will to help articulate a cogent “radical centrist” platform for the Radical Resistance, you’d have a lot going for you.

There’s plenty of broader stroke policy issues that progressives might want to glom on to the Radical Resistance rubric. That’s fine, but I see this as a matter of building the broadest group of anti-Trump forces possible. We have a specific goal — getting Trump impeached in the House and getting 67 Senators to vote for conviction at his trial.

That, at least, is what I want personally.

I just want Trump removed from office immediately and whatever I have to do on a political level to get that goal, I’ll do. Pence sucks, too, of course, but at least he’s something akin to a traditional politician who follows norms. Trump, meanwhile, is an abscess tooth that might go septic at any moment.

The urgency for Radical Resistance is growing with the possibility that Trump could go full tyrant on us by declaring a National Emergency and spending $7 billion in an extra-Constitutional manner. If that doesn’t make you want to become a member of the Radical Resistance, I don’t know what will.

Let’s do this, people. Let’s end this surreal political nightmare.

Embrace The Dark Side — Take Up The Mantle Of ‘Radical Resistance’

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

It goes without saying that a lot of Blue Check Liberal Nattering Nabobs on Twitter will clutch their pearls at the notion of the currently nebulous anti-Trump “Resistance” getting a lot more radical and a lot more organized. They will say would be a boon to Trump and MAGA on any number of different levels.

I say fuck that.

We’re in a crisis and as such we need to embrace the idea that we are, in fact, radical. But as I keep saying, its more about being radical on an ideological level as opposed to, say, blowing shit up. The Resistance needs to establish a united front of anti-Trump forces then use the ideology of Radical Resistance, that using “any means necessary” to politically destroy Trump and end him as a political force is a rhetorical goal then use that as bludgeon against the alt-Right and MAGA.

As I’ve said before, this is the biggest crisis since the end of the Civil War in a way, because it’s like an abscess tooth that risks going septic. We need to stop worrying so much about what Trump might tweet about the idea of “Radical Resistance” and BECOME the Radical Resistance.

Again, the issue is having an overarching ideology. Something cogent enough and broad enough that you might be able to get #NeverTrumpers to support it on Twitter while not alienating the base of the Democratic Party, which, to date, has been, in essence, “The Resistance.”

But as I keep saying, I have very, very low expectations. If we don’t get Trump politically by August 2019, we’re not going to get him until 2021, if ever. We need to stop worrying about what may or may not happen in the Senate. The House needs to do its job and and begin actively investigating the Trump Administration on any number of different levels.

I have my doubts this will ever happen until a Radical Resistance begins to actively begin to put pressure on Establishment Democrats by threatening to primary them in 2020 if they don’t support what I suggest. The Convention Wisdom of the Blue Check Liberals on Twitter in starting September 2019 will be “let the people decide” and any talk of impeachment is a “gift” to Trump and MAGA.

That’s why we have to do it now.

We have to stop hoping and wishing that some mythical Mueller Report is going to give us the fit leaf need to somehow magically convince mouth breathing MAGA people the error of their ways.

It just isn’t going to happen.

So why bother in the first place?

Impeach Trump immediately in the House and see what happens in the Senate.

It’s Not ‘Radical Democrats,’ Mr. Trump, It’s ‘Radical Resistance’ — If You’re Nasty

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I find it odd that Trump, the master branding and marketing guy, hasn’t figured out to call people like me Radical Resistors. It definitely rolls off the tongue better than Radical Democrats.

I am well aware that the Blue Check Nattering Nabobs, should they actual read any of these posts I’m writing here, would say “You’re only helping Trump by all this ‘radical’ talk.'”

Maybe. Maybe not.

The battle is going to be joined politically soon enough, so why not embrace the phrase Radical Resistance now instead of feeling bad when Trump inevitably stops snorting Adderall long enough to figure out its use for himself?

Meh.

As I keep saying, all my talk about being radical is strictly one of theory and ideology. I hate violence and don’t sanction it in any way for any reason. I just want Trump politically destroyed as soon as possible.

But I honestly don’t see anything happening in time for it to matter.

Trump’s going to survive until 2025.

Fuck.