Tag: Mad King Trump

A Known Unknown In Impeachment — The Fate Of Abortion At SCOTUS

Known Unknowns.

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

The thing many men don’t realize is a huge swath of the female population see abortion as an absolute fail-safe. It’s easy for Republicans to demagogue the issue of abortion because it’s a complex situation and all they want is a simple solution so they can declare victory and win votes.

This comes out most notably when Republicans — speaking to their base — say some pretty bonkers things about abortion and rape. The reason why they keep doing this is they are trying to lay the groundwork politically for an absolute ban on abortion. They say completely deranged things about “justifiable rape” because they want to invalidate the argument that there should at least be an exception for rape. In their fucked up worldview, they think women will lie about being raped so they can get an abortion.

As for the “incest” and “life of the mother” exceptions, they either lulz it or pivot to something else should the issue come up. Republicans really do want women to be charged with manslaughter if they have an involuntary miscarriage.

With that in mind, the whole point of Republicans appointing judges for the last 30 or so years has been ending Roe V. Wade. And, at last, it seems as though they may very well get their wish pretty soon. The conditions are there, at least, for Roe to be overturned sometime between now and, say, Thanksgiving. (It may be later in the session, but we live in insane times, so, lulz.)

Should Roe be overturned in the middle of Trump’s impeachment process, this would not bode well for The Dear Leader. I’m not saying he will face any consequences — he never does — but women who already hate his guts are going to become apoplectic. There’s at least a small chance that women who feel powerless to do anything about the end of Roe will channel that rage into trying to bring down Trump.

But, I dunno. Trump’s a tyrant. I got nothing as to how we would ever get past Moscow Mitch.

If There’s Any Justice In A Post-Trump America, We’ll Treat The Kurds Like We Did The Hmong

Shelton Bumgarner
Welcome To America, Lady.

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

By now, many of us have seen the video of the Kurdish Women’ Protection Force sniper barely avoiding having her head blown off by a stray bullet. She laughs it off. Literally laughing in the face of death.

Our president is currently a deranged racist misogynistic traitor, so he’s hung the the Kurds out to dry. This is similar to what Nixon did to the Kurds with the Shah. But we did managed to do the right thing with a different group of American allies — the Hmong. They were fierce fighters during the Vietnam War and, as I understand it, we allowed them to come the States en masse.

There are obviously a shit ton more Kurds than Hmong, but we as a nation ever want to find some absolution for electing a tyrant president I suggest we might look into giving the Kurds in Syria a similar gimme. If they can prove they were forced out of Syria because of Trump’s treason, we let them into the country, few questions asked.

For any number of reasons, I doubt this will happen. Trump’s likely — with the aid of Moscow Mitch — escape defeat and we’ll careening towards full blown tyranny. But in the unlikely event we do manage to save ourselves from ourselves, letting the Kurds we betrayed into the country is the least we can do.

Ok, NOW We’re In A Constitutional Crisis

Are you ready for your close up, Mr. Rather?
Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I always find it amusing when I notice people from the Deep South checking out this blog. I can only assume they get off on my worst-case-scenario hot takes for the Republic. If you are, in fact, such a person, please fuck off.

The real tragedy of all of this is we’ve done it to ourselves. Hollywood loves alien invasions (V) or alien-robot-invasions (The Live,) but it turns out we have seen the enemy and they are us, as Pogo would say. It’s not aliens that have done this to us, it’s the systemic rot found in the Republican Party itself. As I’ve said before, the stakes could not be higher in this crisis.

The long touted Constitutional Crisis is finally here. The battle is joined. And a lot of fuckwits on the Right are spooging at the idea that MAGA is finally throwing down the gauntlet. They like the idea that Trump would go on the offensive, damn the consequences.

That is all well and good, but by doing so, Trump has opened up a Pandora’s Box. The thing about a crisis is things move so fast that “normal” people who have a vested interest in the slow and steady often have no idea how to handle the events going on around them. It’s the freaks and weirdos who live in a constant state of crisis who thrive. (That would be me. I’m talking about myself.)

But, the point is, there’s a chance that now that House Trump has crossed the Rubicon, that there will be an equal and opposite reaction on the part of House Democrats. They may find they have no recourse than to use their inherent contempt powers. Of course, putting Bill Barr or Mike Pompeo in the House jail is likely to make things even worse for everyone involved.

Then there’s the chance that Trump will dox the whistleblower on Twitter and “joke” that MAGA with their AR-15s should “teach him a lesson.” Republicans will of course be cool with this — they have no shame, after all — but the rest of the body politic might not take “he was just joking” defense as legitimate.

Really, there’s even a chance that Trump will finally get to be the best at being worse — he might tell his MAGA supporters to take up arms against Congress as events progress. He can tell them he’ll pardon them if they do it. Again, Republicans will lulz this even as it actually begins to happen.

I’d like to think the military might sit on its hands, no matter what, but who knows. Again, that’s why this is a crisis. I just can’t fathom any kind of endgame right now. Whatever happens, we’re in a new political era — maybe even epoch –in the nation’s history. The worse part of all of this is it’s likely to be just a brief respite. At best, we escape another MAGA president in 2020 should we manage to banish Trump politically. If it’s not Tom Cotton, it will be Kris Kobach…and the list goes on.

And, sure, I know there might be MAGA people who read all of this and don’t see as a reason to fight back, but as a reason to embrace the warm waters of tyranny. If you’re that person — please, for the love of God, fuck the fuck off.

Anyway. Now what. If we can’t banish Trump politically pretty soon all is, in fact, lost. The guy is a menace to the Republic. He needs to be removed from office, given due process in a court of law and, if convicted, put in prison for the rest of his life. If he’s a free man, he’s going to meddle in election after election until Don. Jr. or Ivanka becomes president.

Of note.

Trump Is Really Bad At This — But He May Still Yet Survive

Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

So, apparently, Donald Trump political genius is beginning to settle on the idea that all of this is just a Deep State conspiracy to bring him down. Now, in a sense this is effective messaging, I also think it’s something of a stopgap.

I say this because Linda Tripp, Lucianne Goldberg and Matt Drudge weren’t exactly pillars of objectivity when they concocted their plot to bring down Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton did, in fact, do something wrong and Donald Trump, too, has in fact done something wrong. He has done several Big Boy Crimes, in fact.

But when you’re desperate and involved in a total war against your political opponents, you try to spin anything that might help you with the base. Apparently there is some sort of connection between the whistleblower and a major Democratic candidate. If Trump did, in fact, do Big Boy Crimes, I don’t see how that is really of any concern. I guess they can say that what Trump released doesn’t prove anything and, lulz, fuck you.

Trump knows he has Moscow Mitch as his firewall, no matter what. So, I guess he really is going to get away with this and go full Mad King on us. I see no reason to think that this is the end of American democracy as we know it. Trump, in an effort to save himself, will break the back of the Constitution and that will be that. I will find myself in a re-education camp soon enough, never to be seen again.

As of right now, my only hope is Trump will do what he always does, which is self-own. In this case, his self-own is likely to be in the guise of going completely bonkers after he is formally impeached. But that’s debatable. The stakes could not be higher and the good guys don’t always win.

Republicans Are Desperate To Change The Narrative

Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Now that we’re in the “total war” phase of the impeachment imbriglio, Rudy has been invited to testify before Lindsey Graham’s Senate Committee. What they want to do is spend as many hours as necessary to to the attention to the Bidens’ involvement in “corruption” in Ukraine.

I dunno.

If a Senate Democrat asks a pointed question, Rudy either flips out or Graham turns the guy’s mic off. There goal is to completely muddle the situation to such an extent that the average person “doesn’t know who to trust.”

Will it work? It has a good shot of doing so. Republicans have finally decided to go the gotterdammerung route and destroy everything in order to protect Trump. Either Democrats radicalize momentarily to do something about this, or they don’t.

Trump & Republicans Finally Have A Strategy: Total War

Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Editor’s Note: If you LIKE the idea that the Republican Party is now a criminal fascist enterprise that wants to destroy the Republic, well, fuck you.

I have written about this strategy before. In more informal terms, this is the “Fuck you, see if you can convict me in the Senate” strategy. Trump simply hunkers down and refuses to budge on anything.

TrY AnD SeE If YoU CAn ConVICt Me.

They have also tried to suggest that what’s going on is a “Kangaroo Court” but that’s more base messaging than anything else. The base has no idea what a Kangaroo Court is, but it gives them something to throw about in a conversation to “own the moment.” Also, it’s just a Big Lie and Republicans have started to use it gratuitously in a desperate attempt to get the notion to stick.

He won’t let anyone testify. He won’t give over any documents. He whips up the base on Twitter and demands absolute devotion from Republicans. All things being equal, this is a smart strategy. Republicans have stuck with him this long through some pretty horrible things, so he has ever reason to believe they will continue to do so. Apparently the base is flipping out to 2016 levels which they were going to do anyway in 2020, so maybe they’ll just stay riled up until then.

The only weakness with this strategy are really more observations that the best laid plans of mice and tyrants don’t always go according to plan. One possible weakness is, as always, Trump himself. But he’s held up pretty well. He’s still cogent. He comes off as mad as hell, but not so bonkers that Republicans begin to feel nervous having to defend the indefensible.

Another potentially problematic aspect of this strategy is its extremely high stakes. These are the highest stakes possible. Trump risks radicalizing House Democrats to such an extent that they start to use inherent contempt knowing they will face only minimal blowback from the public. But given that Moscow Mitch has indicated that he will single handedly kill an impeachment trial in the Senate, I guess Trump figures it’s all worth it.

Once Trump is acquitted, then the Constitution is a dead letter and Trump is free to become the Putin-style tyrant he always wanted to be. Anyone who thinks we’ll be afforded the opportunity to “let the people decide” in a free-and-fair 2020 election should Trump still be in office is a fool.

Trump As An American Nazi & What To Do About It #Resist

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I don’t use the term “American Nazi” lightly in regards to Trump for a number of reasons. As I have mentioned elsewhere, there are three major reasons why it’s difficult for Trump to literally be an American Nazi. Those three reasons are his age, his general incompetence and his lack of an overall ideology.

Let’s go through these reasons one by one and talk about them.

His Age
Trump, at 72, is old. He’s so old that even if he made a run for it by getting his own version of Hitler’s Enabling Acts by way of an Mercer-funded Constitutional Convention that might give him God-only-knows what powers, he would, in real terms, be too old to fully use those powers. At this point, I’m more worried about him hobbling the Judiciary by cramming it with young, loony ultra-conservatives than I am him going full dictator and ignoring the Constitution. He could still try to pull it off one way or another, but he would face the other two issues.

His Incompetence
The famous quip by Benjamin Wittes is that Trumpism is malevolence mitigated only by incompetence. Besides his weird ability to be an avatar for the surreal Right-wing of the Republican Party, Trump is actually really, really bad at his job. He’s horrible. He has no center, no morals and he’s easily swayed by flattery. He’s no Pat Buchanan, that’s for sure, for more than one reason. Trump was really lucky and the fate of the entire American Republic may rest on how completely incompetent Trump is, in real terms, when it comes to welding the reigns of power. But he’s getting better at it, so we find ourselves with the last thing that prevents Trump from going full Nazi.

His Lack Of Ideology
Trump is no Pat Buchanan. If Trump had an ideology outside of being an asshole and having a complete lack of empathy, he would have a real chance at destroying the American Constitutional System and turning the United States into a “managed democracy” like they have in Russia and Turkey. If Trump had some sort of core belief system he was willing to fight for, he would truly be a danger to the Republic. The really surreal aspect of all of this is had Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio won the nomination and won the election, the only thing that would have prevented them from doing the same damn things Trump is doing — outside of the weird fixation on immigration and a wall — is they would have abided by existing democratic norms. Trump is a outlier for lots of reasons and he’s stress testing the entire system because he’s just self-aware enough to be more than just your usual demagogue. But the fact that all he wants to do is win the moment, to “own the libs” at any one moment during any specific debate means he doesn’t have a political center to speak of. It’s difficult to go full-blown American Nazi if you don’t have an ideology beyond whatever you might have tweeted that morning.

Put those three things together and you come to several different conclusions. One, while Trump has all the makings of an American Nazi — and effectively is — in real terms, what he might be is a ominous precursor to the real thing. Trump is rattling the cage, destroying norms, using the Overton Window to fuck things up big time, but more likely than not, he’s the guy who will make the actual American Nazi president possible. Sad to say, the entire American Constitutional System is rotting away as we speak. The Founding Fathers could never have predicted that not only would the Legislative Branch completely put party over country, but in addition to that — in fact, because of it — the Judiciary would be eaten away by the cancer that had infected the Executive.

But I stand by my opinion that Trump is, in fact, an American Nazi. He is the closest approximation to one that the existing power structure is willing to permit. He is pushing the American political ship of state in to unprecedented waters and the consequences in the real term will be difficult for many — if not most — of us to process as they happen. In other words, Trump is a Nazi in spirit, if not literal ability to be one, and the whole Ivanka-is-Jewish thing is really just white noise. Trump is unlikely to attack Jewish directly for the time being — that would be a little bit too much on the nose — but he will go after the next best thing for domestic political expediency — immigrants. Once the infrastructure for Concentration Camps is in place on military bases across the country, God only knows who the Trump Administration will throw in there with immigrants who are a little too brown for its liking. My guess is the mentally ill because, they too, are a weak link in society that requires some compassion and empathy, two things Magaist lack completely.

I still can’t get over the fact that Magaists — some of them mothers and fathers! — have had little or no compassion for the children torn from their parents at the border. If that’s not an ominous sign that America’s very own fascist blight is now upon us, I don’t know what is. The complete dehumanization and lack of basic human empathy is the first step towards some pretty horrible things, at least in the past. I’m reluctant to suggest Trump would have the audacity to attempt to implement a “Final Solution” to the immigrant “problem” stranger things, as they say, have happened.

Having said all that, the next issue is what to do about it.

All I can say is — get mad and stay mad. I would cop-out and say meekly that all you can do is vote. But if anything has been learned from the on-going crisis associated with immigrant children being torn from their families at the border, it’s that really, the only thing the American Republic has going for it now is moral outrage. It’s easy to say that the immigrant children situation was unique in a lot of ways, but it did prove an unexpected point: Trump will actually back down if public opinion is aligned against him enough.

So, don’t just vote. Get enraged. Stay politically active. Use whatever personal political power you might have at your disposal to effect change. What happened with the children at the border has given me a little bit of hope. A tiny little bit of hope that maybe the American spirit is a little bit stronger than I had feared. It’s maybe possible that through sheer force of collective will, American citizens might save the nation through there own actions.

Having said that, I might suggest that we need an app of some sort to organize protests. Something that would facilitate regular massive protests across the country to allow people to take a stand, to hold the line. The next few years are going to be bumpy, no matter what happens, and an app is desperately needed to help The Resistance.

But honestly, I don’t know what happens next. We’re just going to have to keep the faith, if nothing else.

Shelton Bumgarner is a writer and photographer living in Richmond, Va. He may be reached at migukin (at) gmail (dot) com.

Mad King Trump: Mulling Ivanka Trump as Trumplandia ‘Regent’

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

It has been floated in at least one major publication article the notion that maybe the Trump family could appoint a “regent” for Mad King Trump. It is not without at least a limited amount of precedent. Woodrow Wilson’s wife essentially served as regent after he had a stroke.

So, I guess the idea is without invoking the 25th Amendment, Vichy Republicans could, instead of impeaching and convicting Trump — which would never happen — might suggest that Eric, Don Jr. and Ivanka run the country on a day-to-day basis given that, well, the Vichy Republicans have no spine and would never otherwise do anything about Trump even though he’s nuts.

I don’t know how, exactly, this would play out. It would be extra-Constitutional, to say the least do such a thing formally, but maybe a year from now the Republicans in desperation, might announce that effectively a regency has been announced and Trump will get to play with this tinkertoys and tweet all he wants but without any real power behind it.

It would be pretty insane in some respects because it would acknowledge that we’re no longer a Republic, but we’ve finally lurched into something like a quasi-imperial system. Since about 2000 we’ve had this situation, but announcing a Regency, even informally, would pretty much be the end of the traditional American system of government.

And, yet, it would have its advantages. A Regency would be a ready fix to Trump. It’s something that would, at least for the amount of time it took to figure out how to finally get rid of Trump, placate both sides and maybe begin the healing process. Maybe.

The Constitutional purists would scream bloody murder, but if everyone else agreed to let this happen de facto, then maybe we might be able to put this tragic era of Trumplandia behind us sooner.