by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
All signs point to Trump simply never leaving office, no matter what. I say this because of Bill Barr. Even if Trump loses in a massive landslide, Barr is going to be Trump’s hatchet man and make sure all Trump’s troubles go away. In the end, it all endsup at SCOTUS and Trump wins 5-4 or 6-3.
And, yet, it has to be noted that this isn’t going to happen in a political vacuum. This is not 2000. The reason why the Republicans were able to steal that election was the country wasn’t as polarized and it was something of a sucker punch. It took us years to process what happened and why.
While I absolutely believe at this point that TrumpBarr will “not lose” the 2020 election, there is at least small possibility that I’m wrong. In the end Trump’s incompetence will finally, at last be his downfall. But the nation will have to go through a traumatic experience to get rid of him.
Here’s the idea — it soon becomes apparent that TrumpBarr has lost “the mandate of heaven.” So much so that even Senate Republicans, sated by a huge tax cut and hundreds of young, hack MAGA judges might begin to distance themselves from The Dear Leader.
One metric to look at is Sen. Lindsey Graham. If Graham starts to make it clear that Trump should leave office because, lulz, he lost the election, then that’s a good indication that even though Trump is using the full weight of the U.S. Government to stay in power, that the political ground has shifted subtly beneath him.
But the biggest metric to look at his Trump himself. If Trump’s insanity and political criminality fuse — which they will — then it’s possible we enter a gotterdammerung situation where Trump, using Barr, sort of forces the issue. He forces EVERYONE to take a side on an existential level. So much so that the Republican Establishment itself begins to fragment.
I guess you could call this the “Very American Coup” scenario. In this situation, TrumpBarr’s attempt to “not lose” the election is nothing short of a political 9/11 attack. Everyone knows what’s going on. Everyone is on the same page. And it all boils down to if you’re a Trump “true believer” or not.
So, even though even Senate Republicans don’t want Trump to take everything to SCOTUS, he does anyway. He wins there and the country is so fucking enraged at what has happened, that the fucking bolts finally pop off and the United States implodes along the lines of the Soviet Union in 1991. But probably in a far more messy, violent manner — The Big Ugly.
It just seems like 2020 is it. This is the election where 50-odd years of macro trends all crest at the same moment and all of our nightmares and dystopian fears happen at the same time.
I honestly don’t know the endgame. I honestly don’t know if TrumpBarr wins or if such a brazen extra-political attempt to stay in power will be enough to get conservatives-who-are-not-MAGA to get woke or not. If we can’t get that crucial part of the electorate to finally show some backbone, then on a political level, at least, the United States in 2021 will be identical to Belarus in 2021.
