Category: Media

Trumplandia As The Singularity’s Political ‘Event Horizon’

By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

It seems very possible that the source of all the fear and “social anxiety” that has allowed an unstable racist, misogynist, bigot demagogue to rise to power in the United States might be laid at the feet of some sort of slow-moving technological singularity.

The reason why I suggest this is there must be some sort of reason for people being so afraid of the changes taking place in society. Those changes are happening so fast, in part, because of technology. So, maybe things are going to hell in a hand basket so quickly because, well, things are moving too fast for normal civil society to process it.

One could make the case that both Communism and Nazism came about by the fast pace of change that took place in the early 20ths Century. A lot happened technologically in the 1910-1940 period of time and since, say, about 1990 things have really begun to speed up again.

I have given it some thought, and the modern era really began with wide-spread adoption of the smartphone. And, really that’s the thing that allowed modern social media to take off. And this, of course, doesn’t even address the secondary effects of this slow moving technological Singularity that I suggest is taking place. I mean, self-driving semi-trucks haven’t hit the road yet, but we all know they’re coming.

Additionally, things like 3-D printing and nanotechnology will bring even more political change in the coming years. It isn’t too difficult for someone to wrap these technological changes up in an ideology and use them as a blunt force against the traditional post-war neo-liberal capitalist system.

The only thing that has saved us from that potentially destructive thing happening right now is Donald Trump and by extension Trumplandia doesn’t have an ideology.It’s just a rage against all change and it would make sense that the change it’s raging against is, in fact of a Singularity-like change.

So not only are people raging against the fast pace of social change caused by us approaching the Singularity, their rage, in a sense, is being channeled by the very technology that’s causing the trouble in the first place. Social media is not only causing great social change, it is also causing a Darwinian battle in the market place of ideas whereby only the strongest, most extreme ideas thrive.

Thus, the tribal politics that has infected American civil society could best be described as tech-tribal politics. In a way, one could say that while we’ve not reached the Singularity by any means, we have reached its Event Horizon. We’re now finally eternally locked in its gravitational field. Or put another way, we might, in a 100 years, look back and say the election of Donald Trump was the moment when the soon-to-come Singularity started to warp civil society in a demonstrative manner.

To go back to the issue of how this might be used in an ideological manner, it would make a lot of sense if today’s Trumplandia turned into something even more destructive, even more corrosive and even more dangerous to the world order. The barbaric populism and nationalism of Trumplandia might eventually evolve as we grow ever-closer to the Singularity into something more akin to technologically Maoism or Trotskyism. That these long-dead and horrible ideologies might pop back up is shocking to thin about, of course, but I doubt any of us have really given the political power of the Singularity a lot of thought.

We’re so busy daydreaming out how we’re going to upload our minds into computers and live forever, that we totally miss the idea that a demagogue like Donald Trump might lead a nation like the United States down a dark and scary path once the Even Horizon of the Singularity has been reached. You can tall about a Universal Basic Income all you like, but given the tribal politics of the United States, it’s highly unlikely to ever happen, even once automation and robotics take all the jobs.

That is, of course, when we all look at each other and ask, “Now what?”

Answer that question will be the biggest problem faced by modern liberal democracies in the years and decades to come. There just isn’t an easy answer and into that void someone like Trump — or hell, even Trump himself given how fast things are moving now — will come crashing in and lead us all into a dark, scary time not seen since the 1930s.

Interestingly enough, once this process is over, the very idea of the nation-state may fade and the world will be divided into ethno-spheres. But the process of cracking the existing order to do that might involve huge numbers of people dying.

Hopefully the process will be significantly less destructive than what brought about today’s existing order, but there are no assurances. Trumplandia has sped up our political hurdling towards the technological Singularity and we all have to be prepared for the shake up that is to come.

We live in extraordinary times and Trump isn’t going anywhere. By the time the system finally gets unglued, no sooner than two years from now, some truly momentous things may have happened. Weirdly enough, for a movement build on rejecting the fast pace of change during the Obama years, Trumplandia itself is now set to really shaking things up in a manner that may take decades for us to process.

Shelton Bumgarner is the editor and publisher of The Trumplandia Report. He may be reached at migukin (at) gmail.com.

Testimony or Trump Speech? That Is The Question

By Christian Howard

I like many other Americans are facing quite the predicament in my schedule on Thursday. For weeks I had been anticipating James Comey’s testimony, but it seems our dear president will be delivering a speech at the Faith and Freedom event. Isn’t that rather coincidental?

Comey will begin testifying at 10:30 A.M. and Trump’s speech should commence at 12:30 P.M. Now I’m going to put a rather bold prediction out that Comey will still be testifying against Trump in court long after Trump’s little speech. It can’t be too long that Trump rattles on before running out of words. Hey, maybe I’ll even be able to tune into both.

In all seriousness however, I’m anxious to hear what the former FBI director has to say. Scattered comments and stories have come out across the news from Comey, but now he will speak on a direct platform in a court of law. Did Trump really attempt to obstruct justice? Probably. But the real question is if Trump will face the consequences for his actions. This election and administration has drained my optimism and I doubt Trump will be charged despite any amount of evidence.

Besides what actually happens if Trump is charged, more evidence is uncovered, and an impeachment hearing proceeds? If Trump does face impeachment the national will gain a much more competent president and one that can effectively push their destructive agenda. Our president is currently making a mockery of democracy, defacing our ties with other countries, and has ultimately made us an international embarrassment, but without really achieving anything he set out too.

The wall isn’t constructed, the travel ban is locked up in legality, and ISIS is still running wild after his ingenious 30 day plan. Really the area he has been most effective in is simply just blocking and negating progress. As seen from his refusal to sign the Paris Accord, work with other leaders, and a possible NAFTA withdrawal. I guess I have to give Trump credit where it’s due and also declare him a Twitter master.

Speaking of Twitter, if you aren’t able to make Donnie’s speech because of the Comey hearing, he may have set up a nice, interactive activity for the viewers. Insiders from the White House have informed the press that Donald is planning to be live tweeting during the Comey testimony. I’m assuming this is just in case Comey attempts to spread any fake news and old Donald has to set him straight.

Trump’s lawyers are urging him not to take to Twitter, though he seems pretty adamant on doing just that. I for one hope Trump rightfully defends himself on social media and is able to expose the truth behind the investigation. Honestly though, I just can’t wait for the goldmine that is Trump’s Twitter tomorrow if he does follow through with this and seeing if Trump can actually get himself into trouble while actively trying to avoid it.

America has finally fully embraced its celebrity and reality television culture to the whole to the point where Donald Trump is my president. Well now I guess I sit back and watch and see what spicy drama stirs up after tomorrow. I urge all to watch Comey’s testimony and have a look for themselves at what our president is hiding.

Let’s Play Pretend: What If The Russians Really Did Hack The Election?

By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I am not one of those who thinks the Russians managed to actually hack into our election booths and throw the election, and, yet, it is kind of weird that Hillary Clinton lost Pennsylvania and Florida. Spooky weird.

So, let’s play pretend.

What could we do, after the fact, if we proved 100% that Russian hackers had managed to hack into our election systems and throw the election for Donald Trump. Then what?

Well, the short answer is: WE ARE COMPLETELY FUCKED.

There simply is no effective method to nullify a presidential election. It’s not like we can recall the Electoral College and tell them to vote for someone else. That ship, as they say, has sailed. It is not a bug, but a feature of our system that it’s so difficult to get rid of a president once he or she is in office. It’s that stability that has helped us weather any number of catastrophes over the centuries.

I mean, even if we got rid of Trump, we still have Pence who is not as bad as Trump in some ways because he’s at least sane, but worse in others because he has an ideology that he adheres to when it comes to his absolute world view. And there is zero possibility that the Vichy Republicans would impeach BOTH Trump and Pence, and even if they did, we have Paul Ryan to deal with, who is a gutless stooge to Trump if ever there was one.

So, really, there’s nothing we can do. The revelation that the Russians had successful hacked out election would probably cause a epic, if momentary, Constitutional Crisis, but the thing that people like me want — a center-Left president who does what Hillary Clinton would have done had she become president simply is completely, totally impossible. It simply is not going to happen.

We’re stuck with Republicans for a sold two year and they can do all sorts of damage to the traditional welfare state between now and 2019, which would be the earliest we could start to fix this problem and that only works on the assumption that a Blue Wave might flip the Congress Democratic.

And, really, the only scenario that comes anywhere near being a reality is in 2019 the Democratic Congress manages to impeach both Trump and Pence, blocks Pence from naming a successor and then we endup with President Nancy Palosi. That’s pretty much an impossible scenario for various reasons, in large part because the hysterical 30% of the population who hates Hillary Clinton would hate Nancy Palosi just as much. America has some serious fucking problems in its political system and they ain’t going no where anytime soon. Let that sink in, folks.

So, dry your tears. Pull yourself up. We’re fucked. Really, the only thing we can do is, as I keep suggesting, engage people who disagree with us. Try to overcome tribal politics as best we can and try to heal the bizarre wounds that risk tearing the nation asunder.

The Struggle Is Real: How To Address Trump In Art

By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I am working on a novel, or at least trying to, and I’ve decided to make the dystopian world that Donald Trump seems to want to create as my playground. But it’s tough. Things are moving so fast in reality, that it’s difficult for me to grapple with how to address Trump in fiction.

I don’t know. I just don’t know. Maybe that’s why Hollywood has been so slow to talk about Trump directly. It wants to sit things out a little bit before it tries to help us collectively process things. But we’ll see, I guess It will be interesting to see how things play out.

Hollywood, Take Note: Isaac Asimov’s ‘Mule’ Is An Allegory For Donald Trump

By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I keep talking about and feel like I’m shouting out into the void, but here I go again. The reason why I keep talking about how Isaac Asimov’s character in The Foundation Saga, The Mule, is Donald Trump is because Trump isn’t funny anymore.

For nearly two years, we’ve spent a lot of time joking about Trump and it’s time we stopped falloning Trump and started to take him as the tragic, Shakespearean character that he is. Trump is doing real damage to America both at home and abroad and it makes a lot of sense for Hollywood to stop lashing out randomly at Trump and start to weld its cultural power in a much more constructive manner.

Hence, a movie that dealt with just the portion of The Foundation Saga that deals with The Mule would be pretty cool and culturally powerful because for much of the novel, The Mule is something of a comic character. It’s only later, when his true identity is reveled that he becomes dark and sinister.

I feel like we’ve reached the point in the Trump saga when if you made a reasonably faithful adaption of The Foundation Saga that you might have a pretty big hit on your hands, on a par with A Game Of Thrones. Of course, given how much Star Wars copped from Foundation, you would have to be pretty creative to to make the universe seem fresh.

But if you simply made a movie about the specific part of The Foundation Saga that deals with The Mule, I think you could pull it off.

The Madness Of King Trump, Redux: How Will History Judge This Era?

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Maybe we’re all missing the point. Maybe the only way to save the Republic was, at least for a short time, to burn it to the ground. What I mean by this is maybe if Hilary Clinton had won things would have been even worse than they are now — that even seems possible.

My only hope is maybe all of this will burn itself out. Maybe only by proving the point — that Trump was and is completely unqualified to be president — that is the only way we can dig ourselves out of this whole. If Trump was out of power at this point, he’d be spouting off and riling people up without the consquences of being in power.

With him in power eventually, inevitably, there has to be, just has to be some political consquences to pay. He can continue to live in his own lala land forever. At some point — it may take a lot longer than I’d like — we collectively as a nation will reject Trumplandia and everything will go back to normal and we can forget about this horrible, surreal turn of events.

That, of course, is the most hopeful spin one can put on this disaster. I guess you could have made the same case about Hitler in 1933. But this is the United States, not Germany, so I’d like to think our civil society is stronger than theirs was during the rise of Hitler.

So, I guess what I’m saying is this could either be just a hiccup in our nations journey, or it be that this is when the final dystopian reality descends on the United States for good. I guess, really, it all depends on us as individuals which one it is.

But I’d like to think our civil society is stronger than the madness of one leader. But maybe I’m deluding myself. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe power has been concentrated in the hands of the executive to such an extent that there’s no going back. And given how the Vichy Republicans are completely complicit in all of this, it seems as though this is a wilderness we’re not going to get out of easily.

It goes without saying, I think, that there are many, many books to be written about Trumplandia in the years and decades ahead. I would like to think this is just a blip. That Trumplandia will, in fact, burn itself out. I have to have that hope, otherwise I get depressed and don’t engage.

A Jeremy Corbyn Victory In Great Britain Would Be A Political Thunderclap

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I am just a clueless American when it comes to British politics. I know just enough to get myself in trouble, but let me prepare you: if Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn wins this week, be prepared for the instant political experts to pop out of the woodwork on Twitter, saying this is a huge win for The Resistance and may indicate that a “Blue Wave” may yet reach American shores.

I know enough about British politics that it is often seen as foreshadowing political trends in the States. So, in a way, it’s kind of like the Virginia governorship race. Since it’s the first big race after the presidential race, it’s come to be seen as a de facto referendum on whomever is in power.

In the late 1970s, Margret Thatcher in Britain was, in fact, an indication that the center-Right across the globe was ascendant and that the United States was ready for the Reagan Revolution of 1980. Given how much it seems the political establishment in Great Britain hates Corbyn, even a near-victory at this point would be enough to leave
experience political watchers in daze for a few days.

A lot of people in Washington and beyond would look at each other mouths agape at what had just happened. In real terms, it wouldn’t mean squat for Trump’s political fortunes. And it’s not like your typical Republican Trump supporter is going to be phased at any event beyond their parking lot.

So, really, at least in the United States, a Corbyn victory won’t mean much. It will definitely rattle around in our political system some, but Trump will still be president and we’re still going to be fucked. Yet it is an example of how the people who supported Trump thinking something would happen to him and Mike Pence would become president and usher in a new era of love and peace might have gotten more than they bargained for. At least, I really hope that’s the case. Those people really piss me off. They were really to be enormous hypocrites for no other reason that they wanted power, they wanted just the possibility that Mike Pence might be in line to be president.

Meanwhile, Rome burns.

Regardless, I hope Corbyn wins. As a moderate American liberal, the shock of a Corbyn win would be an actual cold hard political fact that I could cling on to while the good ship USS America continued to sink and its mad captain continued to rant at the helm.

But maybe Corbyn won’t win. I don’t know. I’m no expert, but Trump sure is doing everything in his power to piss the people of Great Britain off so they vote for Corbyn in defiance.

The Deafening Silence From Hollywood Regarding Trumplandia Is Perplexing

By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I have repeatedly questioned why instead of pretending to cut Donald Trump’s head off, why Hollywood doesn’t collectively turn its guns on Trumplandia. I am well aware that it takes time to conceive of, develop, write and produce a scripted drama of any sort. It just takes time. I get that.

But you’d think the little media bubble that I live in would be at least occasionally punctured by buzz that this or that anti-Trump movie or TV was being produced. And, yet, to date, I have heard of nothing. It’s all very odd.
I just don’t get it. Is it that Hollywood is too shook or is it that the executives that would be the ones to greenlight such things are complicit in Trumplandia and they simply won’t risk losing money on an obvious anti-Trump metaphor while events are actually happening. It’s just too soon for them to think about alienating that core 30% of the population that supports Trump no matter what?

And, remember, the last time that Hollywood actually went to war was, well, a war — World War II. And it could be that Hollywood executives with some institutional memory know that during Watergate people kind of tuned out of politics in pop culture. The only relatively contemporaneous piece of art to come out of Watergate was All The President’s Men.

But having said all that, here are my suggestions for movies to be remade in this age of Trumplandia. Given that Hollywood apparently has completely run out of ideas, Hollywood might be more receptive to remakes than original content.

Or something.

1984
This movie is so obvious in the age of Trumplandia that it seems like it would be greenlit the moment someone suggested it seriously. The book itself is apparently doing gangbusters again and it seems that there would be both a market and an audience for another remake.

The Caine Mutiny
The final scene of this movie might cut a little too close to home. The whole movie, with its mad captain might be something people would really get into. And it’s great source material it would be so obvious a metaphor for the Era of Trump that it probably would do quiet well.

Being There
This movie would require a deft touch. The reason is it would be too easy to re-interpret the source material as an angry diatribe against Donald Trump’s presidency. The movie is, in its own way, already a metaphor for Trumplandia, if albeit in a much more innocent manner than we are currently suffering. But if you updated it technologically, it would be really funny and tragic and scary. Kind of like our real world is right now.

Network
This is such a perfect movie — especially in the context of Trumplandia — that the only reason to remake and update it is we live in desperate times and simply re-issuing it wouldn’t be as culturally significant. We really need this movie remade as soon as possible. But I would suggest doing something with it other than a shot-for-shot remake. That would just be dumb and unproductive.

Seven Days In May
It is temping to simply use the name and not do much with the source material. Events this May really were shocking enough that you could give them a narrative arc and go from there. But, really, you could simply do somewhere where by there’s a coup attempt against a mad president or some such.

Mr. Roberts
This movie is about honor and the responsibilities of power and if you remade it, it could be a sly commentary on Donald Trump’s presidency. At least it makes a lot of sense to me.

Anyway, having said all that, let’s talk about some original concepts one might look into.

A Movie About The Mule</strong>
This one seems so obvious that it’s sad that generally no one listens to me and thus nothing will happen. It would be different if I had the rights to The Foundation Saga and, like, was a screenwriter of any note. I would just write a screenplay myself and pitch it. But HBO is supposed to have the rights right now, so you’d actually have to have some money to make that a reality.

A sequel to Idiotocry
This is pretty obvious. Just update that movie to today’s insane reality and run with it.

A movie about the Fall of France in 1940
The Fall of France was a lot like Election Night 2016, and I think people would really see the comparison being made if someone produced a movie about it.

Regardless, Hollywood needs to get its act together. It needs to address this really important subject as quickly as possible. If the gears are put in motion now, maybe a really cool movie will pop out about Election Day 2018. That’s all we can hope for at this point.

Trump is Right. Paris Accord Doesn’t Matter. But his Reasoning is Fatal for the US.

The entire climate change debate is a total ruse. On both sides. When looked back on in the future by our grandchildren, they will have no idea why we sweated, fought and clawed at each other over such a massive nothingburger.

Don’t get me wrong. There is ample evidence of climate change being caused or at least influenced by us. I’m sure that we can all lather ourselves up in giant bathtubs full of convincing data or go trekking across ice glaciers with Leo DiCaprio and Al Gore while we scream in agony at the sky. And wax poetic tales of woe of what kind of country we’re going to be passing on to our kids.

That particular aspect is beyond debate, at least for anyone who doesn’t have oil or nonrenewable energy interests or people on the right who are gullible enough to believe false narratives about climate change that have been hatched by oil and nonrenewable lobbyists. That’s a separate issue worth discussing at another time. Maybe a separate post on the mass neglect of the reform needs of the public education system and how much the 1% stands to gain by keeping the 99% undereducated or at least disadvantaged.

The problem with climate change is why such a monumental fuck is being given about it. The spirited, moral grandstanding has fully transcended the issue. Protesters take to the streets equipped with obligatory talking points on the surface issue. But what they lack in knowledge, they make up for it in the crusade to rail about corporate interests and the 1%. And everyone, especially the right, is missing the larger issue which is far more fatal to the long-term interests of the United States than water levels rising a little bit longer than a ruler in 80 years.

Bear with me as we first take a look at the good news.

The Paris Accord’s primary aim is to prevent the global temperature from rising 2°C by 2100. That’s not just our kids we are talking about. But their kids and the kids of those kids.

The debate rages on about the welfare of our future generations from the lens of where we are at 2017. With zero consideration on how much tremendous technological change we are going to be facing even in the next 25 years, let alone 80 years.

I’m talking about the coming technological singularity and how every single microcosmic facet of our society stands to change and we’ll have AI transcending the limitations of the intelligence of even our best scientists.

Before going further, read the easy-to-understand intro to the AI revolution that was brilliantly written by Tim Urban. If you can’t stand reading and prefer digesting 140 characters or less, then just read the first few paragraphs. It covers enough to help make my point.

To summarize, take a look at the below picture. This is how we look at the future. The assuming comfort that we can look at it with the same gradual trajectory as we’ve lived in the past. This is also how Paris Accord forecasting has been done.

The next image helps reveal what happens once AI transcends the human capacity to think. And not just one human. But within a relatively short amount of time after exceeding the intelligence of a single human, Moore’s Law estimates that AI will exceed the collective intelligence of all humans in the world. And once we’re at that point, maybe just a few weeks later, AI will exceed the collective intelligence of every single human that ever lived. And that future trajectory looks like below:

Notice how in the first graph that we can’t see that big spike coming?

Take a look at this next graph and see how flawed our personal forecasting is when relying on past growth trends.

Point being, everything around us is on a course for fundamental change. Most futurists estimate that, rather than being frightened by the prospect of a dark and dreary AI future like what we saw in the Terminator, humans will piggyback on the AI explosion by adopting BMI. The crudely named Brain-Machine Interfaces.

Scoff all you want, but you won’t be waking up one day and reading that there are line-ups for a new store offering chip implants or Matrix-like wires coming out of the base of your neck. It’ll be like the principle of how to boil a frog. You start off with the slow burn and warm up over time and then suddenly, we’re in a whole new era. For example, Apple is developing a Deep Learning OS for their iPhone that is so robust that it’ll be able to read your health vitals by simply having a patch on your skin that sends signals to your smartphone. That’s how it starts. Getting technology on us or in us for the betterment of our health. Then things go from there, especially once 3rd party app developers and investors start going in new directions with the technology. Can you imagine living with your pager in our current time of smartphones? Imagine your reaction if you traded up from a pager to a smartphone in 1990. The transformation is palpable. But things are moving far quicker now in terms of innovation.

The most widely praised futurist, Ray Kurzweil, has indicated that we’ll reach the point of Super AI, technological singularity, before 2045. In fact, things have changed since he predicted that. For example, the Asian game of ‘Go’ has been referred to as the final frontier of game mastery for AI. Far more sophisticated than chess. Last year, the handlers of Google’s AlphaGo only expected for the AI to win one out of five games against 18-time world champion, Lee Sedol. Instead, the AI won 4 out of 5 games and the human player was only able to win his game due to what Go experts call a masterful performance that will be studied for the ages. But the bigger story was how much further AlphaGo had developed that it blew away even its developers’ expectations. As a result of that, AI experts remarked that the AI behind AlphaGo was ten years further along than they expected in terms of amassing its own intelligence. And just last month, AlphaGo took on the reigning world champion, China’s Ke Jie, and beat the human player 3 games to none. 

Because of this and other factors, it comes as no surprise that Kurzweil has been re-emphasizing his prediction that AI will attain human levels of intelligence by 2029. Just 12 years away. And then go on to attain a level that exceeds all of the brainpower of mankind by 2045.

Why is this important in a Paris Accord context? Because even us dim-witted humans have already started down the road toward switching cars and commercial vehicles to clean energy, a feat likely to be widely realized in 10 years’ time. And then it won’t take much for that to transition to the shipping and transportation industries. Then you’ve got biotech and nanotech, with the potential to have nanobots released into the atmosphere to help dial back the environment to a pristine, pre-Industrial Revolution state.

And this is all based on human-led innovation. Imagine when the singularity comes and we bootstrap intelligence. Imagine that if Kurzweil is right and this all comes down the pipe in 2045, well before the 2100 goal to bring down global temperatures a smidgen. Even if Kurzweil is way off, 2100 is still a joke in terms of forecasting. If we don’t have the environment receiving a proper spit-and-polish by 2100, we’ve got bigger problems. As in, we’d be all dead due to some cataclysmic event that took place before then (and that won’t happen. Just as we give safe distance to Amazon tribes to evolve without the influence of advanced society, we only intervene when it appears their mass survival is at risk. It’s safe to assume that aliens are also giving us our needed space to evolve but will or even have covertly intervened when we put our civilization at risk of mass extinction).

To sum up, by mid-century, this will all be sorted out. Regardless if the US signs the Paris Accord or not. But there’s a far greater problem related to all this that Trump’s oil lobbyists and everyone else are missing that has crippling consequences for the US. Which I’ll address in my next post.

Vichy Republicans & The Fall Of The American Republic

By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Someone said on Twitter that it felt like Trumplandia was “cratering” tonight. I would strongly say the opposite. Because of the callow, craven nature of the Vichy Republicans that have essentially given absolute control to Donald J. Trump, things are only going to get worse for the foreseeable future.

Only if something really, really telling happen, like a Jeremy Corbyn win in Great Britain would I sit back, rub my beard and mull the possibility that maybe that things have gone to far. Something like that would give me some hope that maybe the pendulum is swinging back toward some form of sanity. I say that as someone who fears if Corbyn won you’d have to que the Benny Hill music when it comes to British politics. It’d be kind of nuts, if fun, if it happened.

Sorry for the noise in the background on this one.

Regardless, domestically, at least we can only take solace in the fact that it appears as though Trump has lost Twitter. Or, maybe, the Russian hackers that manipulated Twitter aren’t getting paid anymore so they’ve moved on. It used to be that you couldn’t have an actual serious conversation about Trump without whack jobs popping out of the woodwork all but demanding you bow down before Trump as Lord Zood. But that has changed in a weird way. It’s the silence that’s really weird. Trump hasn’t lost Periscope yet, so I guess he has that to be thankful for. Periscope users are still completely nuts.

I continue to be really unhappy with where things are going with Trumplandia. The Vichy Republicans are to blame for this and nothing is going to change as long as they’re in power. So, we’re stuck with Trump for a solid 18 months, at least, and that doesn’t even begin to factor in the errant power grab on his part caused by a major crisis that may happen with, or without, his approval and goading.

The Vichy Republicans are allowing Trump to sow division both at home and abroad. They are completely complicit n all of this and I pretty much think we’re on track for the fall of the American Republic. By that, I mean, like the frog in the slowly boiling pot, we may very well wake up one day soon and some pretty basic right will be gone. I don’t know how exactly it will all happen, but it will happen.

Why am I so sure? Well, the silence on the part of the Vichy Republicans is so loud and the cancer on the American body politic that is Trumplandia seems to be metastasizing so quickly that what other inevitability could there possibly be? Not to sound too much like a Debby Downer, but I really need some hope. I need something to latch on to — like a Corbyn win — to give me some indication that there will be a happy end to this dark period.

I place all our problems at the feet of the Vichy Republicans. If they would put country over party, then the system of Constitutional checks and balances put in place by the Founding Fathers would actually, like, work and stuff. But as it stands, we have a tyrannical, would-be autocratic madman at the center of the nation’s political universe. What’s worse, he keeps alienating everyone but is base through erratic tweets, pulling out of important international agreements, and generally being a monumental dick.

But because the Vichy Republicans are addicted to power above all else, and the Republican base that elected Trump and continues to support him has absolute sway over them politically, there is nothing that might induce them to have anything resembling a backbone. It’s just not going to happen until they’re kicked out of office. I’d like to think that a Blue Wave of The Resistance might do the trick, but may be deluding myself. Given that people are dropping out of Congressional races due to death threats, that pot may be a lot closer to boiling than
I would like to admit.

Really, it seems as though if power is the only thing that the Vichy Republicans care about, then the only time they may get a backbone is about a year from now should it appear as though they are going to lose “bigly” in the 2018 mid-terms. If that doesn’t seem to be the case, they won’t say a peep. But if things take a dramatic turn for the worse between now and, say, July 2018, there might, just might, be an unprecedented series of events where by the Vichy Republicans finally grow a pair and demand some accountability from the Trump Administration.

Even more interesting, as I have mentioned before elsewhere, if the Vichy Republicans lose Congress in November 2018, there might be a battle during the lame duck session of Congress between Republicans and Democrats to see who gets to impeach Trump first. The reason being, the Republicans would want the right to approve now President Mike Pence’s replacement.

And that doesn’t even begin to address my true nightmare scenario for 2019 whereby Trump would simply pardon everyone involved in Tsar-a-Largo — including himself — and hold up on the White House with the nuclear codes and dare anyone to come after him. A shoot out between the Secret Service and FBI on the White House lawn would be, uh, unique from a historical standpoint.

I guess all of this comes back to the point that we shouldn’t assume history goes in a straight line. We could very well be at the end of the road for the American Republic as we have conceived of it for about 240 years now. This could be it. The end. We could be, from now on, a semi-autocratic quasi-religious imperial system with only the assurance of an open presidential seat every eight years being our last foot hold to our republican past.

It pains me to suggest such a thing, but we can’t delude ourselves into thinking the Vichy Republicans will ever grow a backbone. We could be stuck with Trumplandia for four or eight more years and then we really would need someone to make America great again.

All I can say is what I’ve been saying — stay engaged. Don’t rage, engage is the catch phrase I’ve come up with. It’s a pithy explanation for my personal vision for how we dig ourselves out of this hole. There are no easy answers when it comes to Trumplandia.

We just have to have hope that the American spirit is stronger than a despot who would aim to inflict a “managed democracy” on us from above. Don’t take anything for granted, folks. This party has just begun.

Shelton Bumgarner is the editor and publisher of The Trumplandia Report. He may be reached at migukin (at) gmail.com.