Citizen Trump As Chaos Agent

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’ve been reading a political biography of Hitler in an effort to better understand Trump and I continue to be startled by how different the two men are. While Hitler was definitely a right place, right time kind of guy, he had the wherewithal to bend history to his will. He actually had something that Trump obviously doesn’t have — the ability to think in the abstract.

Trump’s political instincts are that of a grunt. He knows what plays to be base — he IS the base — and that’s about it. There are some very dark forces at work in the collective psych of the American population and they are so dark and powerful that all Trump does is coast off of the energy generated by whatever the fuck that is going on.

In a sense, Trump has served his political and historical purpose. He’s weakened America’s political norms to the point that ANY Republican — be it Ron DeSantis or Glenn Youngkin — will be America’s first autocrat. All the conditions are there for us to slip peacefully into autocracy and 20 years from now someone going back and forth between the United States and Russia won’t be able to tell any difference on a political basis.

But there’s a problem — Trump is such a fighter that as long as he has air in his lungs, he’s going to do whatever he can to save his own hide. He really wants to be POTUS again, setting up a situation where Trump is the Republican primary and it’s not POTUS, but veep, that is the position that everyone wants so bad. Trump is such an old, fat tub of lard that whomever he picks to be his veep will have a good chance of being America’s Putin.

Of course, there is another issue — Trump could cause a civil war in a variety of ways.

  1. An Effort to Stop Criminal Accountability
    This is the one scenario whereby the MAGA New Right people who keep coming to this Website looking for a sooner-rather-than-later timetable for being able to murder people like me without criminal recourse might happen. If Trump really felt he might, at last, face some criminal accountability, he could very well begin to rant that Red States need to leave the Union because of how unjust it all is. I suppose he might, in general, demand in his usual dog whistle kind of way general political violence, but I doubt it. When you have an entire party — the Republican Party –with a cult-like devotion to you, why go for general violence when you can get entire states to leave the Union at your behest?
  2. A Ploy to Convict Biden / Harris in the Senate
    In this scenario, it’s 2023 and Republicans have gone nuts. They have impeached both Biden and Harris out of spite. Now, for Trump to actively be trying to destroy the country, he would, of course, need to have some personal investment in it. So, this one only really works if he is the Speaker of the House and he thinks he can become POTUS again early. So, in a bid to scare the living shit out of the Senate, he, as Speaker, begins to demand Red States leave the Union in order to get what he wants. He says this just as a rhetorical flourish, but MAGA legislatures take him seriously and states, probably beginning with Texas, begin to convene Secessionist Conventions. An away we go.
  3. A 2024 Clusterfuck — MAGA Counter Revolution
    This endgame was two parts to it. It could be that at some point in late 2024, after Election Day, it will be obvious to Blue States that the election was stolen and they have no recourse but to begin the process of leaving the Union. By the time Certification Day 2025 rolls around, we are in a full fledged Secession Crisis. The other possibility is that Trump wins outright — even though he’ll cheat no matter what — and by late January it becomes clear that Trump’s second term agenda is so fascist and radical that Blue States begin to leave the Union.

    But there is a problem with such thinking — Trump, unlike Hitler, really isn’t smart enough to do anything as diabolical as do the simple act of telling Red states to leave the Union in an effort to protect him. If he did it, it would be out of extreme desperation caused by his mind being focused by the prospect of going to prison.

    The point is — America’s political culture is going to be very bumpy between now and January 205. Something’s gotta give. We can’t keep this up forever. We’re going to fish or cut bait on the fate of our democracy at some point.

Author: Shelton Bumgarner

I am the Editor & Publisher of The Trumplandia Report

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