by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I don’t know for a fact that this is going to happen, but all signs point towards it — the Russians are going to hack directly into our election systems at the behest of the Trump campaign.
The reason why I say this is two fold.
One, Trump has removed 1/3 of our troops from Germany. It’s a direct quid pro quo. Two, Trump is absolutely desperate to meet Putin in person before the election. It definitely sounds as though if they haven’t agreed to such a quid pro quo, Trump is going to beg in person to make it a reality.
It’s easy to imagine a situation where, much to our surprise, Trump wins on Election Night in pretty much the same way he did in 2016 — he loses the popular vote, but wins the Electoral College. There might be some isolated protests and a lot of gnashing of teeth, but we’ll all begin to process that American democracy has been murdered.
Then, gradually, after a few weeks, we start to hear rumblings about how some of the voter numbers don’t make any sense. Of course, Trump will do everything in his power to obstruct any investigation until after the Electors vote, so, lulz.
And that will be that.
I guess there are a few ways this pretty much perfect plot might go wrong for those involved. They might get greedy and fuck with the results in New York State in such a way that it begins to raise questions. Or Trump, who absolutely can’t keep a secret, might begin to allude to things that while they don’t make any sense because we don’t know the context, gradually people realize he’s confessing to stealing the election.
But there are some things to keep in mind, even if we realize the plot exists. One, autocrats always win. They don’t care about anything but power, so fuck you. No amount of protesting or pressure on social media will change the verdict. Also, there would be a pretty tight deadline for any of it to matter. Even if we found absolute proof that it happened, the same mechanisms that have saved Trump to date will be used yet again.
Really, the only teeny-tiny obstacle to Trump’s success in stealing the election this way is the Electors. And, even then, a lot of things would have to go wrong for House Trump in quick succession for that even to be an issue. And, as we all know, that never happens. Any problems Trump ever gets into are of his own making. There are no institutions strong enough to stop him at this point.
Of course, there is one last thing that might be an obstacle to House Trump’s final consolidation of power — a civil war. I don’t know how it would all work out, but we had absolute proof that Trump got the Russians to hack into our election systems, pretty much the only way it would matter is if there was significant violence. Not only would it have to be severe violence across the country, the U.S. Military would have to, in essence, stage a coup of sorts. I’m not in any way advocating that, I’m simply stating a cold hard fact. Also, there’s every reason to believe that if the American military was forced to get involved, they would take House Trump’s side.
A million people could protest peacefully for weeks across America and, just like the protests associated with the Women’s March and BLM, after the initial shock wore off, the protests would not get much media attention. And what media attention they did get would be about how Trump’s Little Green Men were beating the shit out of people.
So, in short, we’re doomed. It’s over. America is nothing more than a Russian vassal state at this point. America is Russia. Russia is America.
If I was a Blue Check Liberal writing for Vox, I would at this point tell you some woke way that you, as an individual could fix this problem and, lulz, who am I kidding. There’s no hope, only Zuul.
