Now, let me be clear — the only way we get rid of the death cult that is MAGA is, well, the biggest catastrophe in American domestic history since the Civil War. And, even then, there’s a 50/50 chance that we’ll endup with some Handmaid’s Tale level bullshit.
But, since Don Jr. thinks I’m looking forward to such an enormous clusterfuck because…I’m as big a dick as he is? — let’s go through what the MAGA death cult death rattle would look like.
Denial This is where we are now. They beat impeachment, they beat TrumpRussia, they beat Stormy Daniels, they beat EVERTHING. So, the idea that essentially fucking God himself would stab them in the back is a little too much for your MAGA death cult thought leader. So they say it’s all a liberal media conspiracy to hurt Trump. It’s nothing more than the flu, fuck you, Rachael Maddow. So, their denial is mixed with hate.
Anger This the most dangerous step. This is when MAGA will start to lash out and murder people in frustration. When it comes obvious that the jig is up, they probably will become transitional, at last. They will settle some scores once and for all. I’m thinking by about Wednesday we’ll reach this point.
Bargaining This will be the most pathetic part of all of this. Suddenly, all the hateful badfaith thought leaders of the MAGA death cult will switch gears rather abruptly and say it’s time for us to come together as a nation and give the Dear Leader the “thoughts and prayers” he needs. This will probably happen about the time the significance of the Gray Plague begins to sink in. Maybe the end of next week?
Depression This is when Sean Hannity breaks down in tears and goes all Jimmy Swaggart on us. Hugh Hewitt might also get rather mopey on TV at some point. Matt Schlapp, meanwhile, will continue to be quite content with MAGA even as the dead and dying grows more and more tragic
Acceptance For us to have gotten to this point — sometime within the next two weeks, things will have had to have gotten so bad for MAGA that, at last, the hate and rage that is at the core of MAGA will, at last, be squelched. This would be maybe a month or two from now when the old order has finally collapsed and a new on is slowly beginning to come together. Suddenly all the MAGA thought leaders will be thinking about how they can explain the many, many, many, many, many, many, MANY lies they told for Trump so they can act as if nothing happened the last four years.
The above is, for the moment, a delusional liberal fever dream. And, even if we finally get Sean Hannity to shut the fuck up about Hillary’s email server it will simply not be worth it to me, or any other American. That’s why it’s a tragedy.
I’m going to give you the known conditions of what’s happening as we enter the weekend and YOU can tell ME what YOU think is going to happen. At the end I’ll give you some of what I’ve written about Trump going bonkers and you can use that, too, to decide what would happen if Trump suddenly woke up to the fact that he was absolutely not going to be able to weasel his way out of being blamed for the astonishing spread of COVID19 in the United States. Trump’s NOT a political genius as Maggie Haberman thinks, but only, in fact, a very lucky idiot.
Within about 48 hours of the first case being reported in northern Italy, the country was reporting hundreds of cases of COVID19.
The first instance of “community spread” COVID19 has happened in the United States about 48 hours ago. The United States doesn’t have a comprehensive testing strategy right now. It’s beginning to get better, but everything is being seen through the prism of short term politics. Everyone is trying to score points, not save lives. There are 335 million Americans who move around a lot and are very social.
As such, our only metric for the time being people getting sick. There’s a good chance we have a “shadow pandemic” taking place in the United States caused by a lack of testing. As such, COVID19 may pop out of the population like a kraken in rather abrupt fashion.
COVID19 is spreading and Trump doesn’t care.
Or, put another way, if you don’t have any metric for who has it because you’re not testing, and you’re not doing anything to stop the spread, then, well, lulz? You’re fucked. You could have a HUGE pandemic bouncing around the nation’s 335 million people at an alarming rate. Every day we don’t do some of the crazy things that places like China, South Korea and Japan have done to stop the spread, COVID19 uses to grow exponentially. More people spread it around their community. More people get sick. More people begin to die. But it’s likely they would be treated as if they just had the flu.
At some point, however, things would get so bad — like they have in Iran — that it would hard to ignore what was going on. Probably what would happen would be a LOT of elderly people would begin to die. They, too, would probably at first thought to have died from “the flu.” And we wouldn’t know any better until A LOT of elderly CELEBRITIES and POWERFUL PEOPLE began to die in quick succession to such an extent that the general population noticed it because each one of those events was news item.
Also at risk — if China is any indication — are nurses, doctors and other members of the health care system. Nurses as young as 29 have died there from COVID19. So, it is reasonable to assume that something similar would begin to happen in the United States. But because COVID19 was bouncing around unchecked, more and more such individuals would begin to die.
Now, if you take all those conditions and mull them for a bit, it definitely seems as though everyday something doesn’t happen to wake Trump up that maybe he needs to be a leader, the worst the situation is going to grow when something happens that finally does. In other words, as long as Trump tells MAGA this is all a Deep State conspiracy to bring him down, more and more lives are being put at risk.
I suspect the WuFlop — where people faceplant and begin to writhe on the ground like they’re possessed might give even MAGA people pause for thought. The conditions are there for this weekend to be rather dark on more than one level. And Trump’s willfully oblivious to what’s going on, focusing more on the stockmarket than the lives of the 335 million people he swore to protect.
Do The WuFlop.
The Gray Plague, too, might rattle the cage of a few of Trump’s supporters. Maybe. Either that, or we have some significant political violence in the United States. Places like Virginia I could see exploding into violence pretty easily if the vast majority of the United States was sick. Gun nuts, in particular, are itching to overthrow the Virginia state government because, lulz, they hate liberal democracy and want to fuck their guns.
Of course, this IS Trump we’re talking about, so once he realizes the magnitude of his fuck up, he’s probably going to snap. He’s going to panic in a rather frightening manner. He might shut the country down in various ways. He might order all planes out of the sky — including shooting them down. He might order the Internet shut down. He might start a war to distract people. Or, worst of all, he might just snap. The issue, of course, is there’s no political will to do anything about Trump until well after he inevitably wins re-election through any means necessary. The 25 Amendment is a dead letter, too. So, I honestly don’t know what would happen if he snapped in the middle of the biggest domestic crisis since the Civil War.
I’ve written at great length about what Trump losing his mind might look like. Here’s an example.
For about four years now, I have been telling anyone who will listen that I think Donald Trump is an existential threat to the Republic. The last few days have pretty much proven my case. It’s rare that I look out in the blue winter sky and wonder if I’m going to see a DPRK ICBM in the sky, heading to nearby-ish DC.
I have even begun to pace out how I would know it had happened. The EMP burst would zap all electronics in the general area of the nuclear blast and so, well, nothing would work. I have thought about how many sites the DPRK would target and the likelihood they would actually be able to blow them up. I love Koreans, but they have no “medium” switch on a cultural level. So if president crazypants managed to get them to the point where they wanted to take us down with them, then, then they would probably shoot as many as five ICBMs towards us. They have a pretty nice H-bomb arsenal at this point and the means to deliver them across the entire United States.
But they haven’t really had a chance to test the whole system, so there’s a good chance what would really happen is we would all collectively shit our pants at how fucking close we came to 10+ million dead (at least) in the United States alone. We aren’t really prepared on a psychological or emotional level to deal with THAT many dead in the context of civilization continue to exist. But that would be a real possibility — as long as the Chinese and Russians sat on their hands, any nuclear war between the DPRK and US would be on the low end of a “limited exchange.” Given how fucking bonkers Trump is, of course, he would probably nuke the North Koreans out of existence using not just tactical nukes but h-bombs. You could probably turn most of North Korea into an unlivable radioactive hellscape with as few as 5 h-bombs. Think about that. That’s pretty deep.
The point is, however, that we’re definitely lurching towards what I’ve suggested all along — things are going to get so extreme and so surreal pretty soon that we’re going to learn a lot not just ourselves as a people but something pretty basic about our nation as a whole. If there’s nothing Trump can do that will lesson his support for any reason, what happens if he get’s so bad on a mental level that we all start to think maybe we’re entering The Dead Zone. Maybe the reason there’s no intelligent life in the universe is inevitably an ET Donald Trump pops up and blows the planet to bits? Is it possible that Trump’s not just an existential threat to the Republic, he’s an existential threat to the species?
I suspect that we’re just fucked. MAGA just needs Trump cognizant enough to make it into his second term. That’s it. By that point his new Veep — The Kooch, Kris Kobach, Tom Cotton, Tucker Carlson or Don Jr? — will be in place to pick up the slack. So I fully expect one of the scenarios we face is Trump uses any war in the Middle East to win re-election and the he promptly turns into a psychological puddle and we get the American Hitler we’ve all been expecting in Trump.
I just can’t see ANYTHING that will force Trump out of office for any reason other than a peaceful death sometime in the next 10 years. He’s just one tweet away from demanding a Constitutional Convention to “pass a balanced budget amendment.” He will get it, they will go rouge and pass Enabling Acts on a Constitutional level and I die in an ICE camp sometime in the next two to three years. Lulz!
Another, far darker scenario is Trump doesn’t make that far. He manages to crater on a psychological level not when MAGA needs him to (any point after Jan 20, 2021) but, say, sometime in the January-October time frame. If things get as mindblowingly surreal as fear, Republicans will have three lines of defense, 1) Let the people decide 2) If only we back off and give him some space, he’ll make America Great Again 3) The Pence Pivot.
The last one is one of the more clever moves they might use. If things get so absolutely extreme that the Republican Lizard People finally face the unthinkable of having to admit that, well, maybe Trump really WAS a worse choice than Hillary Clinton, they will simply say that Trump needs his rest and Pence is making sure Trump’s vision of America (ugh) becomes a reality. We’re safe because of Pence, in other words.
But let’s say that doesn’t work. Then what. What if what I’ve mulled before happens. I mean, what if Trump really finally flips his lid — and in the middle of a major regional war in the Middle East, no less! Then what. Poor old Hugh Hewitt’s brain may break. If you’re such a cockholster for The Dear Leader and finally reality comes crashing into the situation in a way that even you can’t spin or deny, then, well, things are going to get fucking lit. A lot of smart, educated grown-ass men have debased themselves absolutely for the sake of Trump and every day Trump gets worse and more dangerous for not just America but the FUCKING WORLD.
The single most surreal event of my life will be if Dennis Prager+Hugh Hewitt+Matt Schlapp get on TV and have a complete, total mental and emotional breakdown when, like The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy, they realize they hitched their “lives and scared honors” to the wrong guy. This is unlikely to happen, but thinking about it happening is kind of chilling. That level of bonkers behavior on the part of a “public intellectual” would be rather disturbing.
Only if, say, a few million people died and everyone blamed Trump for it could I see that happening. In real terms, those guys have gotten what they wanted from Trump — a tax cut and young, hack MAGA judges. They have no shame and our media ecosystem is so broken that the moment Trump is no longer politically viable, they’ll change their tune in mid-conversation and act as if nothing happened. Fuck those liars.
Anyway, I generally don’t think any that extreme is going to happen. Far more likely is Trump will always be just on the cusp of losing his mind and yet never quite get so bad that Nancy Pelosi strikes by sending the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate so they can be used essentially as the 25th Amendment. He will drift into his second term and The Kooch (or whomever) will be the person who puts me in a camp and is indirectly responsible for my death in American Killing Fields. (In upstate New York maybe?)
Here’s a little fragment I wrote about how difficult it would be to get Trump physically out of the White House if, for some reason, we did manage to decide to get rid of him against his will.
9/10th a story fragment of a possible near future by Shelton Bumgarner
April, 2019
The eyes of the world were on the White House.
Just moments before, President Donald J. Trump, 45th president of the United States, had been convicted by 67 members of the Senate for a whole list of high crimes and misdemeanors. Trump had for weeks now been ranting on Gab about his case in the Senate, bouncing back and forth between threats to start a war with Iran or the DPRK and not-so-subtle hints that he might take his own life should he be convicted by the Senate.
And, now, at last, the moment of truth had arrived.
Trump legally, at least, was no longer president, but he had been oddly silent since the verdict had been announced with great fanfare from the well of the Senate. Trump’s conviction had come after months of investigations on the part of the now Democratic Congress. The length and breath of Trump’s malfeasance discovered by these hearings had rocked the nation to its very core. On more than one occasion, MAGA talking heads on cable news had been interrupted by astonishing breaking news that left them, for once, unable or unwilling to defend the president.
The hearings had ground on for months to such an extent that Trump’s approval had slowly drifted to the 20s and stayed there consistently. Trump’s support was now made up of the very rich and the very poor. Oddly, despite Trump’s near constant demands on Twitter for violence on the part of his supporters, little, if any was reported. Trump had grown so frustrated that he had all but abandoned Twitter at one point for the more receptive Gab social media platform. Though on more than one occasion Rudy Giuliani had made it very clear it was within the rights of the president to declare martial law if he deemed it in the best interests of the nation. More than one delegation of Senate Republicans had gone to the White House to explain to Trump that he was going to be convicted, no avail. Trump made it clear to them, in not so many words that his simply living in the White House made him president, a sentiment best expressed by the legal saw that, “Possession is 9/10ths of the law.”
Finally, a post to Gab came out: “My so-called ‘conviction’ is the work of the Deep State and as such illegitimate. I remain president.”
This set off a chain of events, the likes of which Americans had never seen. Suddenly, everyone on Twitter became a Constitutional scholar as everyone studied the exact wording of the Constitution as to what happens if the president is removed from office by the Senate. The wording is quite clear: he or she is no longer president and that’s it.
Nowhere in the Constitution did it explain what to do if the president simply decided to ignore the Senate. What’s more, nowhere in the Constitution did it state what to do with the nuclear launch codes should a president be removed from office and he refuse to accept the decision of the Senate.
The next few hours were chilling as they were surreal for millions of people not just in the United States but around the globe. The issue of Trump’s physical access to America’s nuclear launch codes was suddenly at the forefront of everyone’s mind. Though it was finally announced that while the nuclear football remained in Trump’s possession, Sec. of Defense Mattis had ordered the American armed forces to stand down for the duration of the crisis.
Trump, on Twitter, was as defiant and unhinged as usual.He threatened to kill himself. He threatened to start a nuclear war. He vowed to declare martial law.
The usual suspects on cable news did their best to spin all of this for Trump. As an anxious nation waited for the now former president to leave the White House, a cavalcade of former Republican Senators and Trump White House staffers attempted to make the former president’s case. Their final argument was that for the good of the country, Trump should be allowed to remain president, despite his lawful conviction by the Senate.
Things began to move rapidly at this point.
Vice President Pence was sworn in but Chief Justice Roberts in a dark, somber event in the Old Executive Building. Meanwhile, it was learned Trump had quietly replaced his Secret Service detail with a private security force that made it clear it was prepared to defend Trump until the bloody end.
At this point, two things happened. A final bipartisan delegation of Congressional leaders came to the White House grounds under the flag of truce. During the course of an hour-long meeting, Trump screamed at them that they had never supported him and the world would be better off if it just ended instead of allowed the forces of the Deep State to ruin America. He made it absolutely clear that he would never leave the Oval Office willingly.
With that, they left.
Next, a surreal, bizarre event, the FBI slowly began to surround the White House. There was much debate online and on TV about how long the nation should wait for Trump to leave the White House. CNN went so far as to do a deep dive into the exact amount of food the White House grounds might have available at any one moment.
Finally, shots rang out from the White House as the battle was joined. It took several hours but in the end, the FBI was finally able to secure the facility. Nearly a dozen personnel on both sides died during the course of the Battle of The White House.
In what would become ionic footage, Trump was quietly escorted from the White House grounds. He spent the remainder of his days ranting on Twitter and Gab that he was the rightful president.
Mandatory Credit: Photo by Invision/AP/REX/Shutterstock (9241938da)
The Walt Disney Company CEO Robert Iger attends a special screening of Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” at Alice Tully Hall, in New York
NY Special Screening of “Beauty and the Beast”, New York, USA – 13 Mar 2017Shelton Bumgarner
By Shelt Garner @sheltgarner
Why did Bob Iger leave Disney so abruptly? I don’t think it’s a conspiracy theory to say he may have known through his network of Masters Of The Universe that there was a really good possibility that Disney as he knew it for 15 years was a Dead Man Walking.
I’ll leave it to the folks at CNBC to do the fundamentals, but a back of the envelope projection of Disney’s profits for the rest of the year look like this:
#US0
Nothing. The moment someone does the WuFlop at a Disney property anywhere in the world and it’s recorded, well, that’s it. Disney will have to survive off of Disney+ subscriptions for about a year. And I seriously doubt that will be enough to prevent some serious pain at the House The Mouse Built. No new TV or movie production. No one will go to Disney Land or Disney World. But everyone in their house with a lot of free time will use their Disney+ subscription like crazy.
For A Whole Year
So, I guess, what may have happened was Iger wanted to quit at the top, rather than have his potential legacy destroyed by having to complete re-imagine Disney from the ground up to accommodate the mainstreaming of “Immersive Media” over the next 18 months.
But the above is just wild speculation on my part. A bit of financial “infotainment,” if you will. Don’t use it to make any financal decisions, for Christ’s sake. I’m nothing more than Brian Fellows, writing in an obscure portion of an unimportant part of the Internet.
We’re in a crisis. This weekend could be momentous. A process, a war, if you will against COVID19 may begin sometime in the next 48 hours. Our nations psyche will be torn open as millions grow sick and thousand die. We will enter an interregnum of the world orders.
Heroes will be made. Cowards will be shamed. All will be remembered.
And so we have to keep a calm mind. We have to realize that there will be battles won and lost. The fragile nature of human life, human existence will be shown more than once. Empire will fall. Empires will rise. A entire generation, the Millennial Generation, now know for “killing” this or that industry, may be know for saving civilization itself.
But it will take a concerted effort among individuals of all ages, genders and races to defeat this new foe that brings with it fear, hate, and death. The United States may be brought to its knees soon because of rank mismanagement on the part of the current administration. And our ruler, a would-be tyrant, may see this as an opportunity to finally strike a death blow to Columbia.
Whenever I have such doubts, however, I am reminded of my time in South Korea as an expat. One of the things I learned during my five years there, at a modern day Terminus, was great risk brings with it great opportunity as well. When an old order collapses, both the tyrant and the slave have opportunities they never had before. As such, if Trump, as I fear, comes completely bonkers and, at last, declares himself a king, I believe leaders from the common folk who will arise to defend Columbia from his threats. These “renagades of funk,” if you will, will use all their will to ensure that the covenant of Washington and Lincoln will, again, be renewed.
But such a renewal will not come easy. It will come at great cost. And just as Father Abraham lost his life at the end of his “fateful trip,” so, too, may new martyrs of liberty fly too close to the sun. But I am a man of peace. I would much rather have the power of rhetoric as my sword than any mere physical armament.
I am a man of peace. A man of ideas. And I am an American.
On 9/11, Rudy became America’s Mayor because he was a leader for one memorable afternoon. He soon became the toast of the nation and, but for him generally being a doofus otherwise, he might have even become president one day.
And now we have a new crisis on our hands. But this one is not one that will involve minutes or hours, but days, weeks and maybe even months. It’s not day-long event, it’s a month’s long process. This is when you have to start thinking about leadership on a practical level.
A fish rots from its head, so we can lulz the entire Federal executive at this point. And, really, I just don’t see anyone in the Legislation branch being in a position to step into the leadership void. So, it seems, it’s likely to be local and state leaders who may see their career’s taken to the next level. Leadership is like water — it flows wherever it happens to be. There thousands of qualified leaders on the local and state level and as it becomes apparent that the Federal government is brain dead a lot of talented people are going to find themselves pushed into the spotlight.
I’m still not totally prepared to say this is going to get as bad as it might. But the conditions sure are there. That people directly from the Wuhan hotzone essentially spread their version of COVID19 to people in California is, however, enough to give one pause for thought. The issue is because of how bad the Trump Administration is we’re giving COVID19 a lot more time to spread within the American population than it might otherwise. There are just so many social events taking place right now that once we finally realize we have The Stand on our hands, that it will be rather jaw dropping.
And that will be the moment when leadership will count most. And, yet, it won’t be just elected officials who will face a moment of truth. It will be people like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert who will find themselves required to address the nation in ways they never imagined. And all because we — or the Russians — elected a doofus Right-wing Twitter troll as our president.
This is just a back-of-the-envelope scenario. Could go a lot of different ways.
Friday, February 28th Iceland reports a massive COVID19 outbreak that effectively brings the country to a standstill within 24 hours.
Saturday, Feb 29th The Democratic Primary in South Carolina occurs. No Mayor Pete.
During a Saturday Night Live, popular Not Ready For Prime Time Player Pete Davidson passes out in the middle of skit and begins to writhe uncontrollably on the ground.
This is a media explosion and it becomes apparent that COVID19 has, at last, struck the United States in broad daylight after weeks of a “shadow pandemic.” But the only information we get on the subject from the Trump Administration is a pained expression from Mike Pence. Larry Kudlow appears on Fox News that same night and waves the event off, saying Davidson was probably drunk.
Sunday, March 1st We learn that Mayor Pete doesn’t just have “a cold” but has COVID19 and will be out of the race for some time. This is the talk of all the Sunday shows. We learn that Davidson is in critical condition with COVID19. Pressure builds on the Trump Administration to be more transparent and pro-active but they ignore this because, lulz, Davidson for his BDE, is a liberal and fuck that guy.
That afternoon, we begin to hear reports that a number of well-known elderly celebrates have died in quick success after a “brief illness.” There are reports of panic buying here and there across the country. There are also isolated reports that hospitals are growing overwhelmed with people with “the flu.”
March 2 — March 6th Each day, things grow worst for the States. Even the Trump Administration can’t message the base about how bad things are by the end of the week. The number of elderly people reported dead, rich, poor, power and powerless, grows larger and larger by the day. By the end of the work week, the economy collapses because not only are too many people sick, but parents are afraid to let their children leave the house.
March 7 – March 13 Things by this point may go one of two ways. Either there is a continuation of government issue or Trump finally completely fucking loses his mind and starts ordering the Air Force to shoot passenger planes out of the sky.
I dunno. This is just a scenario. And no one can predict the future. But people are getting sick in the States and we’ve only tested 500 people out of 335 million.
A number of things brought down the Soviet Union. The Pope. Ronald Reagan’s massive military build up in the early 80s.
And Chernobyl.
Now, let me frame the following by saying living through history sucks. It’s only given a narrative after the fact. So Trump could very well simply use the coming chaos associated with a massive pandemic in the United States as just another excuse to consolidate power, weaponize the ICE Camps where I will quickly find myself dead. That’s a very real possibility.
Or, put another way, with great risk comes great opportunity — for both the good guys and the bad guys. So, there are any number of pretty dark scenarios that might happen in the next year or so. But let’s, for once, be hopeful and think about a situation where House Trump, at last, meets its political Waterloo.
The key issue is how bad things get on the ground. If what I fear will happen, happens and essentially nearly 100% of the American population is in some way exposed to COVID19 over the next, say, 28 days, then, well, The Thousand Year Trump may….have a problem? Trump on a basic level is very stupid and very lucky. He’s an idiot. He’s nothing more than a Right Wing celebrity Twitter troll who won the historical jackpot. If Trump had decided to play president in one of the Sharknato sequels, we probably would be talking about how James Woods was going to defeat President Hillary Clinton in the fall. Or something like that. It was inevitable — because of the absolute singularity of racism that is the Republican Party — that SOMEONE like Trump was going to become president. So, Maggie Haberman, you sold your soul for access to a very lucky doofus.
Anyway, for COVID19 to be House Trump’s downfall, things would have to grow so demonstrably bad that the base would begin to waver in ways we’ve never, to date, seen. If The Gray Plague culled about a million elderly people over the course of a few months then, well, I’d like to think someone, somewhere might notice and decide not to vote for Trump in 2020. While that might make Twitter Liberals have a spontaneous organism, there’s also a chance that, well, Trump will finally go completely fucking insane. He may snap at the prospect of “losing face” if you will. He’s already barely holding on as it is.
I’ve repeatedly said over the last few years that Trump, because he represents the fears of white people about long-term “browning of America”that essentially he’s a king, a tyrant and absolute dictator and the only thing that would bring him down would be something “extra-political.” So he was never going to be convicted by the Senate for anything he did that could, in any way, be construed as either a policy difference or the idea that the a lot of people didn’t like him. Whatever will bring Trump down will be something so jaw dropping, so debase, so completely surreal that is goes past the bounds of politics into something darker and far more scary.
So, I would propose that should Trump feel that because of something out of his control, like, say, a massive pandemic that brings the nation to its knees over the next two weeks, he may snap. And because he’s already successfully beat impeachment AND the 25th Amendment is a fucking dead letter — I have no idea what the end game might be. Probably would happen is Trump would bring us to the brink of the end of history by blowing us all up. If he didn’t manage to pull that off, then, and only then, might either the 25 Amendment be invoked, or Nancy Pelosi strike again with another article of impeachment or three.
Or, put another way, there’s a chance that when Trump does finally lose to history, it will be of benefit to none of us.
Other than working overtime to re-assure the stock market, the Trump Administration is doing effectively nothing about COVID19. This is because of the metrics they are using.
Keep The Markets Happy All Trump wants is the “German Industrialists” to be happy so they will continue to give him a pass on policy. So, in his mind, “it’s just the flu.” As such, given a lot of people die from the flu each year –as Twitter liberals keep telling me — as long as he has an effective messaging strategy and plutocrats make a lot of money then lulz. A million people could die unnecessarily and, well, that’s not really that much more than the flu, right? Trump has such a lack of the ability to comprehend any form of empathy or compassion that as long as the economy is humming and he and his shithead plutocrats are making money, the poors can fuck off.
Win Re-Election This goes hand-in-hand with the above. He’s extremely paranoid about the evil liberals with their evil fact-base science “weaponizing” reality to “bring him down” that he, again, would rather withhold valuable information from the public in the hopes that, in effect, people will forget about it. It’s just the flu. All your old relatives died because of “the flu” so shut up and vote for me, you mouth breathing knuckle dragger. In other words, as long as the base believes it’s “just the flu” and remain locked in, then everyone else can fuck off and drop dead. Power for power’s sake. Greed for greed’s sake. Cruelty for cruelty’s sake.
Consolidate Power And, really, if you wanted to kind of dystopian, you could say there are people like Stephen Miller who simply see the prospect of The Gray Plague as a means to an end — consolidation of power far quicker than they could ever imagine otherwise.
There are two ways to look at these metrics. One, Trump’s going to yet again evade any political consequence because the base is so afraid of the browning of America that Trump can send the whole country over the precipice and, well, lulz. And, I guess, there’s a decent chance that might work out. A lot of people — especially older people — may get sick and die, but if you can stay on message that “it’s just the flu” then lulz, no political harm no foul. It will be a more deadly edition to a string of Trump self-owns that have happened over the years. This is why Mike Pence is in control of the American response to WuFlu now. He’s a complete suck up who wants to stay on the ticket in 2020. He has every reason to prevaricate as need be to have people simply shrug this off and go back to raising their kids, paying their mortgage and, most of all, voting Trump 2020 in the fall.
And, yet, there’s another option. What if instead of simply “burning itself out,” COVID19 gets really, really, REALLY bad in the States to such an extent that the usual Trump ratfucking at last collapses? Now, Trump would see this initially as a win because he will have an excuse to get rid of Pence and maybe name Don Jr. his veep. But there are some additional problems his poor addled brain can’t comprehend because, despite Maggie Haberman’s cooing about this all the time, Trump isn’t a political genius, he’s just historically lucky.
In other words, Trump may finally meet his political match if, well, America is brought to its knees on a level not seen since the Civil War. A number of things might happen if Trump strictly follows the metrics I laid out above. The 20% of the infected who get REALLY REALLY REALLY sick may reach such a high percentage of the American population that, well, the economy locks up because no one is well enough to go to work. The health care system locks up and collapses. Even then, however, Trump would probably blame liberals, or MS-13 or whatever the fuck that idiot can come up with. And the base, thinking Trump is Jesus H. Christ himself who is the only person who can stop the general historic tend towards a minority-majority America, will abide by it.
But there are two things Trump can’t control — the WuFlop and The Gray Plague.
The WuFlop This is the rather dramatic — and eerie — event when someone who seems healthy abruptly faceplants and, sometimes, begins to writhe uncontrollably on the ground like they have a xenomorph in them about to pop out. It wouldn’t take too many recorded instances of this happening around the United States in the next two weeks for, well, there to be some political consequences for House Trump. Each time I’ve seen the WuFlop videos on Twitter, I’ve gasped. Initially, of course, these videos wouldn’t be show on TV. But if enough WuFlops happened, there would come a point where they WOULD show up on TV. That would cause a panic and we would, at last, realize that Trump has not clothes and he’s lead us all into a very dark situation with no ready solution in the near term.
The Gray Plague If thing get as bad as I fear, then a whole lot of elderly people are going to die. A whole lot. A huge amount. A shocking amount. And a lot of powerful people are elderly. Of course, Trump would at first see this as a win because if a dozen powerful elderly center-Left people died rather abruptly, then he gets to consolidate power faster. But, “death be not proud,” so a lot of elderly center-RIGHT figures could die, too. If things got bad enough, Trump, at last, might have finally met his match because it will rather abruptly dawn on everyone that it was directly because of his obsession with owning libs that an obscene number of Americans died for no damn reason.
Before you get too excited, we have to think about Trump’s reaction to this. He’s probably going to snap. He’s probably going to, in a panic, shut down the Internet, order passenger planes be shot out of the sky, suspend the Constitution and declare martial law. The question, of course, is what the reaction would be, in practical terms to all of this. I find it doubtful that the US Military would follow any of these crazy orders, but the MAGA base WOULD likely begin to hunt down and murder “libtards”– like ME! — like members of a Cultural Revolution group. I know that sounds rather panicky and hysterical — maybe I have Trump Derailment Disorder — but the we won’t know until that time comes, now will we? We’ve never had a POTUS go bonkers and so, I guess, anything is possible.
Now is not the time to quibble. Pete Buttigieg allegedly has a “cold.” He may have. In fact, he probably does just have a cold. But I feel given a Corona Virus pandemic is whipping around the globe that the public has the right to independent medical verification of this.
This is not too much to ask. And, given this chart:
We may find ourselves asking this question of the old, older candidates who are now bouncing around the country as well, too. I just want verification of whatever is going on.
The current world order gradually formed in the year’s following Japan’s surrender in August 1945. The linchpin of the whole thing is the power, the might and involvement of the United States all over the world. For instance, the 28,000 American troops in South Korea have served as a trip wire and kept the peace between the DPRK and South Korea since 1953.
So. It definitely seems as though because, well, Donald Trump is nothing more than a deranged version of Being There’s Chauncey Gardner, the United States may soon, on a national security level, be the weakest its been since the end of the Civil War. In other words, it’s tough to fight two and half regional wars when the whole nation is too sick, dying or otherwise incapacitated to do anything. For the last four years, Trump has actively been hoping for a 9/11-level terrorist attack so he can start putting people like me in ICE camps. but lulz.
Anyway, there’s a reasonable chance that the next year will be seen as something of an “interregnum” between world orders. The old post-WW2 order may crash and burn and after a lot of wars and general destruction, a new order will arise at some point starting whenever we manage to get a vaccine. But a lot of people will die. A lot of people will suffer. A lot of people will be displaced.
It’s not too difficult to imagine it all starting with a number of regional wars breaking out at the same time while the United States is on its collective knees from COVID19. It would probably be the DPRK attacking South Korea and then Russia attacking Ukraine. Or something like that. Then Iran might have a new revolution. And the the Indian subcontinent may be turned into a post-nuclear hellscape.
And that doesn’t even begin to address the very real risk that ISIS might arise again from hell to subjugate a big swath of the Middle East. Then, once the United States is feeling back to its old self again, we would have to sort out that mess. Though, truth be told, I fear that the United States, Russia and China may have some sort of revolution over the course of the next year. The United States is effectively in the middle of a Cold Civil War right now and a bunch of old powerful people dying wouldn’t exactly help that situation.
But we’ll see. The key thing we have to do is admit that the crisis exists in the first place.
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