Well, if nothing else, I’ve got my motivation to hurry up with the novel I’m developing. The novel deals with some “big ideas” that are quite provocative in the context of the rise of fascism in America.
I have a massive amount of reading to do, however, if I want to make my characters believable. Every time America lurches forward on its now irrefutable path towards an autocratic “managed democracy,” feel added instinctive to work harder and faster on this novel.
The only problem is it is something of an epic undertaking given the significant learning curve I’ve had to deal with as well as how I’m doing all of this in a vacuum. (For the most part.)
Anyway, this dark foreboding I feel about our nation’s future is exactly the feeling I need to make this political thriller as dark as it needs to be. I had worried that my natural fun disposition would make it difficult to find the darkness necessary to write a proper thriller.
Mike Flynn is a traitor. But the fact that he’s likely going to be “exonerates” very, very soon is a testament not to his innocence but how powerful House Trump has become.
Autocrats never lose.
So, either Trump pardons Flynn or Bill Barr simply works his magic again and he’s a free man without a pardon. All the conditions are there for either one of those scenarios to happen very, very soon.
Why Trump and his fellow treasonous travelers have such a huge boner to “vindicating” Flynn is all very, very curious. But they’re going to “own the moment” on the Flynn front and crow about it because it gives them something to talk about other than Trump’s horrific handling of the COVID19 pandemic. That’s pretty much all the Right lives for now — anything they can talk about other than COVID19.
Anything.
It’s stuff like this that lends credence to my belief we’re going to all assume Trump will lose in the fall and somehow we wake up in 2022 and he’s still in office, telling us how desperately we need a Constructional Convention to “balance the budget.”
The center-Left in the United States is historically weak all around and the dystopia is here. We’re not thing more than a Russian-style “managed democracy.” By the end of Trump’s second term, protests will be outlawed and any opposition to Trump in the media will be gutted through a variety of means.
If you oppose Trump and have the means to leave the country now, I suggest you do so. It’s only going to get far, far worse in the coming days.
As best I can tell, Trump is going is going to replace Mike Pence with Ivanka. I say this for a number of pretty obvious reasons:
Trump has a problem with womenvoters What better way to squeeze out every possible female vote in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida but with a female VP. Everyone is so focused on Nikki Haley that they are missing how conspicuous Ivanka is right now. He’s definitely thinking about naming her his veep going into the fall, is all I gotta say.
Ivanka is a “threefer” Not only is Ivanka Jewish, she’s a woman AND a Trump. So, it would be, in a sense, the ultimate troll. The base would accept her because of her last name. The liberal establishment — a group the approval of which Trump craves — would not know what to do with this news at first. Trump and MAGA would get to “own the moment” on a macro level the likes of which they’ve not been able to for some time.
So, while I have long thought Trump would pick either Don Jr. or someone like Steve King to give himself a second term insurance policy, Ivanka would help so much getting him past the Electoral College finish line that, lulz, so what.
And, in a sense, she would still be an anti-impeachment insurance policy because she’s so vacuous that seeing her ascend to the presidency because, say, Trump only got a second term by bribing Electors in a rather brazen fashion, would give Congress pause for thought.
What’s more, in Trump’s addled mind, the idea that her become POTUS would likely give him a boner for two reasons — he wants to fuck her, anyway AND she would likely do such a horrific job that we wouldn’t have a female president for 30 or 40 years because of how bad a job she did.
It is a liberal fever dream that Trump is ever leaving office for any political reason. If he ever leaves office, it will be because he’s finally grown so absolute erratic that MoscowMitch, at last, signals it’s time for him to go.
Otherwise, lulz.
I would go so far as to suggest that it won’t be until Trump bungles a war with the DPRK and is directly to blame for, say, Alabama being vaporized and turned into a post-nuclear hellscape that he leaves office. Trump is going to do whatever necessary to win re-election.
Then he will call a Constitutional Convention. He will be America’s Brezhnev for the next 10 years or so until some other member of House Trump finally ascends to power. Sometime around 2060, AOC will lead an armed popular revolt against House Trump and rule via a junta until things get sorted out.
I honestly don’t see any other endgame. It’s not like Trump’s going to let himself lose in a free-and-fair election. The only votes that matter are the Electoral College votes. He got away with bribing Stormy Daniels. The center-Left in the United States is so weak, he will get away with do something like that again, only in a far more brazen manner.
I’m going to die in an ICE camp. All I got to defend myself at this point is a novel I’m developing.
Maybe it’ll be a success so I can leave the country before ICE puts a bullet in the back of my head.
I have been working on this novel for some time now. It’s totally consumed my life to the exclusion of all other creative endeavors. This is good on a number of different levels because, well, I was wasting a lot of my time and energy on a number of scattershot ideas. But now I have my creative life focused on one thing and one thing only — figuring out canon, plot and character.
Plot and canon are pretty much figured out. But character continues to a major issue. I have to figure out what motivates these characters to do what I need them to do. The point of this novel is it’s a thriller that allows me to run around an allegory of the Trump era in an entertaining fashion. I don’t want it to be preachy like, say Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart. I want it to be a sly rumination on the Trump era that is also something of a tentpole.
I will be the first to admit that sense I have no idea what I’m doing, I’m drafting off Stieg Larsson’s work. He has inspired and influenced me a great deal. But as I become a better storyteller, I find myself flexing my own creative muscles and using what he did as more of a stepping off point than anything else.
I hope to spend the next few days thinking out some crucial character details. I also am going to map out as much as possible the plot in a treatment of some sort. One thing I can’t do is continue to spin my wheels. I need to take a results-oriented, holistic approach to writing a novel. This business of simply doing development in a vocal manner for months has got to end.
It’s time to finally put up or shut up.
I have written at least 200,000 words over the last 18 months of development. I wrote 100,000 words then realized what I wrote was so horrible it didn’t deserve to be finished. But given that I’ve split the story into two novels, it is also now effectively my first draft. That is pretty cool.
Anyway, I know that if, like, anyone liked me, I probably would not have been spinning my wheels for as long as long as I have. But I’ve been working in a vacuum for much of this development and so I have no idea if anything I’ve written is any good.
Things are slowly changing on that front, however, which is pretty cool. Hopefully by the time I finish a professional-grade first draft in a few months, I’ll be able to find someone to read it all for me and ask, “What happens next?”
Trump thinks he can pander to the Religious Right by getting everyone in church in some sort of Trump-As-Christ event around Easter. He thinks everything will wrap up around Easter, we can go back to normal and we want to praise him, praise him, praise him at the polls when November rolls around. That it also gives the markets some sense of security and stability by giving them a definite ending is a twofer.
I guess it might work.
It might work because the MAGA base is such a death cult that even if a few million people die because of this harebrained idea, they will simply shrug and say at least he owned the libs for them. In fact, I would say the ONLY thing that will prevent Trump from cruising into a second term is well, Trump. I could see Trump finally snapping around Easter when it becomes apparent that not only is this not going to wrap up then, but he’s going to be directly blamed for people dying because, well, they went to church for Easter at his behest.
He’s such a self-own artist that it will be Trump himself who brings down House Trump — if that is even possible at this point. Trump going bonkers is pretty much the only thing I can possibly thing of that might bring down House Trump. Otherwise, there’s nothing we can do. I don’t want him to go bonkers because, well, we could all die when he decides to nuke us to oblivion. If he did go bonkers and House Trump fell long enough for a free-and-fair election to happen, it would be rather surreal, to say the least. House Trump is so absolute in its belief that The Thousand Year Trump has been established, the Fourth Reich has been born, that if this even momentarily proves not to be the case, a lot of people are going to be gobsmacked.
The normal rules of politics will kick in with brutal force and Trump will continue to tweet from the sidelines complaining it was a combination “stab in the back” of “the Chinese and liberals” that brought him down. Don Jr. will court the MAGA base and, well, there will be talk of impeaching-and-convicting everyone necessary to get Don Jr. back as president as soon as possible.
I do think Trump will pardon about 20 people — including himself! — the moment we it’s obvious he’s lost even the Electoral College. He may not even leave the White House willingly and that will be the first crisis of the new administration. But I also think Trump’s never leaving office. For him to leave office for any reason — legal, political or self-own — something so jaw-dropping would have to happen that is simply beyond my ability to predict.
We’re stuck with The Thousand Year Trump for about 30 years until the browning of America crosses paths with the decline of the Baby Boomers and finally someone like, say, AOC, topples House Trump and we go back to “normal.”
Fuck you if you’re MAGA. You cocksucker.
I do think, in passing, however, that a lot of these older celebrities who are dying these days are dying of COVID19. Their families simply don’t want their legacy to be how they died instead of their career. I don’t think it’s any sort of “conspiracy,” I think it’s just basic human nature.
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