Category: Tsar-A-Largo

V-Log: The Sunken Place — Trump’s Strategy With Mueller Going Forward

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Some thoughts.

A Deep Dive Into Trump’s Potential Strategy Going Forward

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I may not be all that great at “game theory,” but I’m pretty good at strategic thinking. I have been wracking my brains the last few days as to what Trump is thinking now that he’s lost the House. It is telling that he fired Sessions so quick after this happened. But what, exactly, does it mean?

Look at it from Trump’s point of view — he knows he’s done some very, very bad, un-Constitutional things, but he also knows that no matter what he’s not going to be convicted in the Senate. It’s just not going to happen. There’s no way 67 Senators are going to convict the president, no matter what he does.

This is why it’s so difficult to figure out Trump’s strategy at this point. He knows some basic things to be true. He has two month so do whatever he wants to, but at the same time once those two months are up things change dramatically. If he’s thinking long-term, he knows anything drastic he does simply increases the already high likelihood that he will be impeached sometime in the first quarter of 2019. It’s a real struggle for me to figure out what he does. It seems to one scenario is he might leverage the next two months by striking first. It’s a risky strategy in some ways, but in other ways he’s simply what comes naturally to him — strike back and strike back hard.

So an argument could be made that he would rather declare war first and then hunker down for an impeachment fight rather than wait until January when it’s almost inevitable that there will be investigations and he will, in turn, be impeached. A lot depends on Mueller. If Mueller throws down the gauntlet between now and January, we will enter a surreal moment in our nation’s history when we pretty much just sit around and wait for the new House to be sworn in.

That’s why is seems from a cold, hard white-knuckled political point of view, it makes a lot of sense for Trump to strike first by firing everyone he feels he needs to fire and pardon everyone he feels he needs to pardon — looking at you Don Jr. — and declare war on the House using every available political tool and resource at his disposal. Trump knows that he is, because of the 67 votes needed to convict him in the Senate, pretty much a dictator at this point. He’s a king. And he’s almost certain to be re-elected for various reasons including a riled up base, an exceptional economy and general Constitutional rot.

So, in that sense, I have a hunch that very, very, very soon Bob Mueller will be fired, half a dozen people will be pardoned and absolutely nothing happens in real terms for two months. Trump will have two months to pound away at the in coming House, he can frame any investigations in cold, hard political terms to his base and the country is completely torn apart for the few months it takes to investigate everything, impeach Trump, have it go to the Senate and then die there. Of course, given the states, Trump’s trial in the Senate is likely to be a modern day OJ trial for a lot of people.

On a personal note, I would like to call bullshit on anyone who waves off the need to impeach Trump. I feel it’s out of hands at this point. History has made its decision and it won’t take too much investigation on the part of the House for it to become apparent that Trump has to at least suffer the historic shame of impeachment, even if we all know he won’t be convicted. Remember, the absolute last argument of MAGA will be, “Yeah? Well convict him.”

In other words, we will all know the gory details of Trump’s obstruction of justice, his conspiracy with a foreign power to influence his election….and nothing will happen to him. He will be impeached, but not convicted and that, as they say, will be that. He will win re-election and there will be a lot — a lot — of stories about Trump is now “unbound” because we had one silver political bullet and we didn’t manage to strike the werewolf.

Or, put another way, what will have to learn about Trump will have to be simply staggering for us to get anywhere near convicting him in the Senate. I would also like to note that the moment MAGA people do the “Pence Pivot” whereby they talk about what a “man of God” Pence is and they really voted for Pence, not Trump in 2016 is the moment Trump’s goose is cooked. But what would have to happen for the Pence Pivot to happen would be so astonishing as to leave me astonished.

In short, Trump is likely going to get impeached, be acquitted in the Senate and cruse to a pleasant victory in 2020. That is without considering the possibility of a major terrorist attack or war with either Iran or the DPRK. So, Trump will start campaign in 2024 for his “legacy” and hopefully by that point The Resistance will have come up with the leadership necessary to deny him one.

Shelton Bumgarner is a writer and photographer living in Richmond, Va. He is working on his first novel. He may be reached at migukin (at) gmail (dot) com.

V-Log: Why I Think #Trump Will Serve A Full 8 Years As President

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Idle rambling about Trump’s political fate.

Talk To Me Internet: ‘#WalkAway’ Is Russian Bullshit

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Meh. The Russians are bothering us again.

Podcast: Talk To Me Internet’s Trumplandia: Trump As A Quisling

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

My friend Milo and I did a pretty great emergency podcast on recent developments between Trump and the Russians. It’s kind of long, but it’s well worth your time. It’s really informative and interesting.

V-Log: Talk To Me Internet –Trump Loses Kori Schake & The American Intelligentsia

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

In this wide-ranging video I talk a lot — A LOT! — about the fact that we’ve entered a new era in American history equal to the French intelligentsia’s refutation of Communism after the Russians squashed the Prague Spring. In essence, I suggest that while Trump may never be impeached because of white knuckled political reasons, he has, in fact, lost the American Intelligentsia and now thinking people are beginning to memorialize publicly their opposition to Trump & MAGA.

I ramble about other interesting things as well, but this video is actually worth your time.

V-Log — Take Back America: An Anti-Trump Rant

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Here’s a rambling rant against Trump and his supporters.

Power To The People: The Case For Radicalization To Defeat Stephen Miller’s Nazi Agenda

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Given that it seems Trump has chosen the issue of immigration as his political hill to die on — at least until he can come up with a bigger distraction — it may be time for The Resistance to advocate a lurch towards radicalization. What I mean by that is on an ideological level, The Resistance’s goals have been rather nebulous and it’s leadership lacking vision.

Maybe it’s time to change that.

The thing this draconian policy enacted by Jeff Sessions proves is Trump a modern day Emperor and his actions lay bare the rot at the center of the American Constitution. Growing numbers of people from a wide spectrum of political thought are protesting the obscene policy of ripping children away from their families, and, yet, Trump — who could with the wave of his hand could end it — is, instead, holding his ground.

It takes time for protests to be organized, I know, but this could be the final tipping point needed to get people in the streets in a big way. To get rid of Trump in any meaningful way, we would need regular, massive protests in cities across the country. The only way I can think of to facilitate that would some sort of app. An app that got like-minded people together and facilitated in a meaningful way organization that would lead to regular massive protests.

Now, of course, you could say you could easily do that using Twitter and Facebook. It’s been done before in other countries. But if you designed an app that from the moment you logged on directed you to other liked-minded people and help you use whatever skillset you might have for the cause, I think it would be effective. You could even throw in advertising and the Patron payment function into the app if need be.

Take me, for instance. I’m kind of broke right now, but I’m willing to protests immediately if given the opportunity. Using the app I suggest being invented, the moment I logged on, I would be able to find not only local protest organizers contact information, but ride-share information. The app might, as a value added function, give people easy directions as to how to register to vote.

It is apparent that at this point only a massive show of People Power is going to end this nightmare. If Trump wants a fight, maybe we should give it to him.

Trump’s Fourth Reich #KeepFamiliesTogether

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I have no idea what it was like in the early days of Nazi Germany. I’ve read William L. Shirer’s seminal work The Rise & Fall Of The Third Reich and so I feel as I have some sense of how things began to change in Germany first slowly then eventually quickly. But from my conversations with MAGA people who remain my Facebook friends (for some strange reason) I’m growing ever more unnerved.

Their arguments defending Stephen Miller’s obscene, draconian border policy that tears children away from their families for no other reason than as a brutal form of deterrence are chilling, to say the least. They are, at least in my mind, indistinguishable from what a Good German may have said in the early days of the Third Reich as the Nazis were solidifying their grasp on power. The most chilling Trump supporter, at least for me, is not the conspicuous “deporable” who obviously is an ignorant numbnuts. It’s the smart ones, the educated ones who either shadowbox their defense of the indefensible or they even worse, they actually have some twisted internal logic to justify it all.

That shit is fucked up.

Add to this that the systemic Constitutional rot the United States is experiencing, with Congress no long acting as a check on the executive branch out of a callow, Vichy mentality and you have makes of a horrifying moment in my nation’s history. If we allow this separation policy to remain unchallenged, if we allow it to just become another aspect of white noise, then the jig it ups. The pot has officially begun to boil and the frog — us — is dead.

I say this because once you allow MAGA to shrug off tearing immigrant families apart because of their immigration status, the same logic can be used for anything. If you consider yourself a Christian, or at least a family oriented American and you don’t step up to the plate and challenge MAGA people on this policy, who’s to say you would really get all that upset if Trump in a few years proposed his own version of Hitler’s Enabling Acts.

This is our tipping point. This is it. If you have any doubts that Trump wants to establish a surreal, Americanized equivalent of a Fourth Reich (I call it Trumplandia, but still) they should be eliminated by what’s going on with children on the border. This is a power grab of unprecedented proportions that because of all the other fucked up shit that Trump has pulled over the last year or so, we don’t really have the proper context to judge.

Now, Trump’s version of Hitler’s Enabling Acts might come from an unexpected direction — a Constitutional Convention. We just the approval of a few state legislatures away from such an occurrence and do you really haven any doubt that Trump in his second term might not latch on to that idea as the ultimate way to make and keep America great? Trump is already doing everything in his power to undermine the foundations of the American Republic. Why not take it to the next level and remake the Constitution in his own image? He’s already cramming in as many young, insanely conservative judges as he can onto the Federal bench, so that would be the next logical step.

So, what I’m saying is it’s now or never. Either we stand and fight on this immigration policy or we have failed ourselves and the generations to come. Remember, Hitler was popular in Germany well into 1943. It wasn’t, really, until the Battle of Stalingrad that he began to suffer significant resentment in the fatherland. It’s not hard to imagine Trump in 2024 picking, say, actor James Woods to be his successor. Woods, as you may know, makes Trump look like a liberal and actually has something of a ideology.

Therefore, while we’re all making these comparisons between Trump and Hitler, because of Trump’s age and complete lack of an ideology, Trump may not be who we think he is. Trump could be simply the catalyst, the primordial ooze from whence the real danger is born. It could be that our American Hitler will be elected in 2024 and the rest, as they say, will be history.

But if you don’t want such a dark scenario to happen, then fight with all your might to stop Trump now while we can. Stop him when he’s still relatively weak. If enough people took a stand on this barbaric immigration policy now, then maybe we can, like the 300 of yore, at least buy some time for the democratic forces that we so love.

Shelton Bumgarner is a writer and photographer living in Richmond, Va. He can be reached at migukin (at) gmail (dot) com.

Triage In The Age Of Trumplandia

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

The dark forces of the Trump Administration and its allies are attacking the American Republic from any number of different angles. In fact, they are so many things going on, it’s sometimes difficult to figure out what’s important, what’s pressing and what can be put on the back burner. While not a comprehensive list, here is my humble attempt at some sort of triage on the pressing issues of the day. We’re going to go from the most urgent, to the less urgent.

Most Urgent
Ending Stephen Miller’s Border Policy
This is so urgent for a number of reasons. One, it’s a policy not a law. Two, it’s so inhumane, so obscene that if we let this one continue without taking concrete steps to end it, everything else will be for naught. I say this because of the human factor. Once you establish that this is a cruel policy not a law, and as such could be easily change by Trump, then it makes a lot of sense to focus on this immediately. So, if I was going to exert limited resources on how to combat MAGA, I would, for the moment at least, direct any outrage and attention-bringing ability I might have to bear on this specific issue.

If we turn up the pressure as far as it can go, then it’s possible that maybe Trump will sense that while it’s popular with the base, in the long run it will rile up everyone else enough that they might actually head to the polls in November. And we can’t have that, now can we?

Protecting The Mueller Investigation
This is urgent, but as of right now, not as on the front burner as it might otherwise be for no other reason than Trump knows if he messes with the Muller probe he is messing with an existential threat to his regime. A lot of people who otherwise tacitly give Trump a pass for all the other batshit insane things he does, would sit up and take notice if he fired Mueller or otherwise conspicuously hampered it in any meaningful manner.

Less Urgent, But Still Important
The 2018 Mid-Terms
I am not one to believe that we’re automatically in for a “Blue Wave.” In fact, I believe a more reasonable outcome is a few surprises here and there, but overall the Republicans keep both houses of Congress and Trump not only survives, but prospers. And what we really have to worry about long-term is who replaces him in 2024 and what his “legacy” will be. But if we could somehow actually flip Congress — especially the Senate — then we could stymie some of the more long-term consequences of the Trump clusterfuck. But I wouldn’t get your hopes up. As I mentioned, more likely is the Republicans’ majority in the House will be reduced dramatically, but not enough to end their majority altogether. Meanwhile, in the Senate, it will literally take a political miracle for that to flip.

Long Term Damage To Keep An Eye On
The Damage To The Liberal Order
What Trump is doing to the political order world-wide is something we really, really need to keep an eye on. The damage he’s inflicting on the established liberal order that has kept the world at relative peace for the last 75 years is enormous and wide-ranging. And, really, there’s little we can do about it in the near term. If we could flip one or both of the houses of Congress maybe, then, we could begin to address that. But again, as I said, that, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to be happening, at least this time around.

So, if I was figuring out where to use my resources in the seemingly never-ending war against Trumplandia, I would strike repeatedly at the most pressing issue of the moment, the cruel and unusual border policy. That is, at least in my opinion, something of a weak spot in the near term.