From what I can tell of MAGA’s take on the growing Corona Virus crisis, our addled Dear Leader believes that through sheer force of will he can escape any political consequences from what may be about to happen. He has every reason to believe this. Because about 35% of the population is deathly afraid of “scary brown people” and women with sexual agency, they are willing to give our doofus president absolute power. Absolute. Power.
So, it’s worked before, so why won’t it work again? A lot of people die from the flu each year, so House Trump believes they can message the base such that they shrug the whole thing off. They tell them they’re “patriots” for voting for Trump should there be a deep recession this year and, besides, Biden’s son is a criminal and Sanders is a Communist. Lulz! They think Trump will win exactly the same way he did last time — help from the Russians and a divided opposition. By 2022 he gets his Constitutional Convention to “pass a balanced budget amendment” and he gets to hand over the family business over to the doofus crown prince sometime around 2030.
There’s a problem for them now, however — Coronavirus. If it turns into the biggest domestic catastrophe since the Civil War, it’s at least POSSIBLE the MAGA death cult…might notice? If the economy locks up, the old die and the young starve, it’s within the realm of possibility that Trump’s absolute lock on the presidency might…maybe…work with me here…be a little less absolute?
The next few days — hell, hours — could be crucial. A lot of what is going ot happen may be determined by what has elapsed over the weekend when the Sunday morning political chat shows take place. If a dozen states report cases of Coronavirus and the entire nation is freaking out, then, well, that MIGHT be a little bit more difficult to write off as a simile “liberal media hoax” created by evil liberals who want to hurt our deranged Chauncey Gardner’s fee-fees out of spite. (Look way from the “fuck your feels” mantra of 2016, huh?)
The possibility that Trump’s absolute need to win at all costs slams against his absolute realization that he’s going to be blamed for the death of thousands (millions?) and while he’ll obviously still win because of Russian hacking, that at some point he might have an existential issue on his hands. At that point, he’s going to snap. He is going to lose his fucking mind. He may shut down the Internet. Shut the borders entirely. Order the Air Force to shoot down passenger planes. Tell his followers to murder people he doesn’t like. Whip out his cock and start to masturbate on TV. You name it, he might do it.
The issue for me is, how long before — should the worst happen — the entire country grinds to a halt socially and economically and Trump’s “Hoax Gambit” fails completely? The earliest it would fail, I think, would be Feb 29th. The latest it would fail would be the Ides of March, March 15. There’s something of a spectrum between those two dates, as well, of course.
It will definitely be interesting to see how bad things get before Trump either completely fucking loses his mind, or he, at last, reluctantly for a moment stops thinking about power, or his checkbook or the stockmarket and starts thinking about us, his charge.
He’s a fucking racist idiot. He may never do. He may, instead, simply end civilization rather admit defeat. I wish I was joking. And if you think I have “Trump Derangement Disorder,” let me tell you in advance to eat shit you piece of shit. The lives of millions are at stake and this is not a simple policy debate or me not liking Trump as a person. He’s a fucking idiot and a traitor. And if you support him, you’re complicit, you cockholster.
I’m going to give you the known conditions of what’s happening as we enter the weekend and YOU can tell ME what YOU think is going to happen. At the end I’ll give you some of what I’ve written about Trump going bonkers and you can use that, too, to decide what would happen if Trump suddenly woke up to the fact that he was absolutely not going to be able to weasel his way out of being blamed for the astonishing spread of COVID19 in the United States. Trump’s NOT a political genius as Maggie Haberman thinks, but only, in fact, a very lucky idiot.
Within about 48 hours of the first case being reported in northern Italy, the country was reporting hundreds of cases of COVID19.
The first instance of “community spread” COVID19 has happened in the United States about 48 hours ago. The United States doesn’t have a comprehensive testing strategy right now. It’s beginning to get better, but everything is being seen through the prism of short term politics. Everyone is trying to score points, not save lives. There are 335 million Americans who move around a lot and are very social.
As such, our only metric for the time being people getting sick. There’s a good chance we have a “shadow pandemic” taking place in the United States caused by a lack of testing. As such, COVID19 may pop out of the population like a kraken in rather abrupt fashion.
COVID19 is spreading and Trump doesn’t care.
Or, put another way, if you don’t have any metric for who has it because you’re not testing, and you’re not doing anything to stop the spread, then, well, lulz? You’re fucked. You could have a HUGE pandemic bouncing around the nation’s 335 million people at an alarming rate. Every day we don’t do some of the crazy things that places like China, South Korea and Japan have done to stop the spread, COVID19 uses to grow exponentially. More people spread it around their community. More people get sick. More people begin to die. But it’s likely they would be treated as if they just had the flu.
At some point, however, things would get so bad — like they have in Iran — that it would hard to ignore what was going on. Probably what would happen would be a LOT of elderly people would begin to die. They, too, would probably at first thought to have died from “the flu.” And we wouldn’t know any better until A LOT of elderly CELEBRITIES and POWERFUL PEOPLE began to die in quick succession to such an extent that the general population noticed it because each one of those events was news item.
Also at risk — if China is any indication — are nurses, doctors and other members of the health care system. Nurses as young as 29 have died there from COVID19. So, it is reasonable to assume that something similar would begin to happen in the United States. But because COVID19 was bouncing around unchecked, more and more such individuals would begin to die.
Now, if you take all those conditions and mull them for a bit, it definitely seems as though everyday something doesn’t happen to wake Trump up that maybe he needs to be a leader, the worst the situation is going to grow when something happens that finally does. In other words, as long as Trump tells MAGA this is all a Deep State conspiracy to bring him down, more and more lives are being put at risk.
I suspect the WuFlop — where people faceplant and begin to writhe on the ground like they’re possessed might give even MAGA people pause for thought. The conditions are there for this weekend to be rather dark on more than one level. And Trump’s willfully oblivious to what’s going on, focusing more on the stockmarket than the lives of the 335 million people he swore to protect.
Do The WuFlop.
The Gray Plague, too, might rattle the cage of a few of Trump’s supporters. Maybe. Either that, or we have some significant political violence in the United States. Places like Virginia I could see exploding into violence pretty easily if the vast majority of the United States was sick. Gun nuts, in particular, are itching to overthrow the Virginia state government because, lulz, they hate liberal democracy and want to fuck their guns.
Of course, this IS Trump we’re talking about, so once he realizes the magnitude of his fuck up, he’s probably going to snap. He’s going to panic in a rather frightening manner. He might shut the country down in various ways. He might order all planes out of the sky — including shooting them down. He might order the Internet shut down. He might start a war to distract people. Or, worst of all, he might just snap. The issue, of course, is there’s no political will to do anything about Trump until well after he inevitably wins re-election through any means necessary. The 25 Amendment is a dead letter, too. So, I honestly don’t know what would happen if he snapped in the middle of the biggest domestic crisis since the Civil War.
I’ve written at great length about what Trump losing his mind might look like. Here’s an example.
For about four years now, I have been telling anyone who will listen that I think Donald Trump is an existential threat to the Republic. The last few days have pretty much proven my case. It’s rare that I look out in the blue winter sky and wonder if I’m going to see a DPRK ICBM in the sky, heading to nearby-ish DC.
I have even begun to pace out how I would know it had happened. The EMP burst would zap all electronics in the general area of the nuclear blast and so, well, nothing would work. I have thought about how many sites the DPRK would target and the likelihood they would actually be able to blow them up. I love Koreans, but they have no “medium” switch on a cultural level. So if president crazypants managed to get them to the point where they wanted to take us down with them, then, then they would probably shoot as many as five ICBMs towards us. They have a pretty nice H-bomb arsenal at this point and the means to deliver them across the entire United States.
But they haven’t really had a chance to test the whole system, so there’s a good chance what would really happen is we would all collectively shit our pants at how fucking close we came to 10+ million dead (at least) in the United States alone. We aren’t really prepared on a psychological or emotional level to deal with THAT many dead in the context of civilization continue to exist. But that would be a real possibility — as long as the Chinese and Russians sat on their hands, any nuclear war between the DPRK and US would be on the low end of a “limited exchange.” Given how fucking bonkers Trump is, of course, he would probably nuke the North Koreans out of existence using not just tactical nukes but h-bombs. You could probably turn most of North Korea into an unlivable radioactive hellscape with as few as 5 h-bombs. Think about that. That’s pretty deep.
The point is, however, that we’re definitely lurching towards what I’ve suggested all along — things are going to get so extreme and so surreal pretty soon that we’re going to learn a lot not just ourselves as a people but something pretty basic about our nation as a whole. If there’s nothing Trump can do that will lesson his support for any reason, what happens if he get’s so bad on a mental level that we all start to think maybe we’re entering The Dead Zone. Maybe the reason there’s no intelligent life in the universe is inevitably an ET Donald Trump pops up and blows the planet to bits? Is it possible that Trump’s not just an existential threat to the Republic, he’s an existential threat to the species?
I suspect that we’re just fucked. MAGA just needs Trump cognizant enough to make it into his second term. That’s it. By that point his new Veep — The Kooch, Kris Kobach, Tom Cotton, Tucker Carlson or Don Jr? — will be in place to pick up the slack. So I fully expect one of the scenarios we face is Trump uses any war in the Middle East to win re-election and the he promptly turns into a psychological puddle and we get the American Hitler we’ve all been expecting in Trump.
I just can’t see ANYTHING that will force Trump out of office for any reason other than a peaceful death sometime in the next 10 years. He’s just one tweet away from demanding a Constitutional Convention to “pass a balanced budget amendment.” He will get it, they will go rouge and pass Enabling Acts on a Constitutional level and I die in an ICE camp sometime in the next two to three years. Lulz!
Another, far darker scenario is Trump doesn’t make that far. He manages to crater on a psychological level not when MAGA needs him to (any point after Jan 20, 2021) but, say, sometime in the January-October time frame. If things get as mindblowingly surreal as fear, Republicans will have three lines of defense, 1) Let the people decide 2) If only we back off and give him some space, he’ll make America Great Again 3) The Pence Pivot.
The last one is one of the more clever moves they might use. If things get so absolutely extreme that the Republican Lizard People finally face the unthinkable of having to admit that, well, maybe Trump really WAS a worse choice than Hillary Clinton, they will simply say that Trump needs his rest and Pence is making sure Trump’s vision of America (ugh) becomes a reality. We’re safe because of Pence, in other words.
But let’s say that doesn’t work. Then what. What if what I’ve mulled before happens. I mean, what if Trump really finally flips his lid — and in the middle of a major regional war in the Middle East, no less! Then what. Poor old Hugh Hewitt’s brain may break. If you’re such a cockholster for The Dear Leader and finally reality comes crashing into the situation in a way that even you can’t spin or deny, then, well, things are going to get fucking lit. A lot of smart, educated grown-ass men have debased themselves absolutely for the sake of Trump and every day Trump gets worse and more dangerous for not just America but the FUCKING WORLD.
The single most surreal event of my life will be if Dennis Prager+Hugh Hewitt+Matt Schlapp get on TV and have a complete, total mental and emotional breakdown when, like The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy, they realize they hitched their “lives and scared honors” to the wrong guy. This is unlikely to happen, but thinking about it happening is kind of chilling. That level of bonkers behavior on the part of a “public intellectual” would be rather disturbing.
Only if, say, a few million people died and everyone blamed Trump for it could I see that happening. In real terms, those guys have gotten what they wanted from Trump — a tax cut and young, hack MAGA judges. They have no shame and our media ecosystem is so broken that the moment Trump is no longer politically viable, they’ll change their tune in mid-conversation and act as if nothing happened. Fuck those liars.
Anyway, I generally don’t think any that extreme is going to happen. Far more likely is Trump will always be just on the cusp of losing his mind and yet never quite get so bad that Nancy Pelosi strikes by sending the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate so they can be used essentially as the 25th Amendment. He will drift into his second term and The Kooch (or whomever) will be the person who puts me in a camp and is indirectly responsible for my death in American Killing Fields. (In upstate New York maybe?)
Here’s a little fragment I wrote about how difficult it would be to get Trump physically out of the White House if, for some reason, we did manage to decide to get rid of him against his will.
9/10th a story fragment of a possible near future by Shelton Bumgarner
April, 2019
The eyes of the world were on the White House.
Just moments before, President Donald J. Trump, 45th president of the United States, had been convicted by 67 members of the Senate for a whole list of high crimes and misdemeanors. Trump had for weeks now been ranting on Gab about his case in the Senate, bouncing back and forth between threats to start a war with Iran or the DPRK and not-so-subtle hints that he might take his own life should he be convicted by the Senate.
And, now, at last, the moment of truth had arrived.
Trump legally, at least, was no longer president, but he had been oddly silent since the verdict had been announced with great fanfare from the well of the Senate. Trump’s conviction had come after months of investigations on the part of the now Democratic Congress. The length and breath of Trump’s malfeasance discovered by these hearings had rocked the nation to its very core. On more than one occasion, MAGA talking heads on cable news had been interrupted by astonishing breaking news that left them, for once, unable or unwilling to defend the president.
The hearings had ground on for months to such an extent that Trump’s approval had slowly drifted to the 20s and stayed there consistently. Trump’s support was now made up of the very rich and the very poor. Oddly, despite Trump’s near constant demands on Twitter for violence on the part of his supporters, little, if any was reported. Trump had grown so frustrated that he had all but abandoned Twitter at one point for the more receptive Gab social media platform. Though on more than one occasion Rudy Giuliani had made it very clear it was within the rights of the president to declare martial law if he deemed it in the best interests of the nation. More than one delegation of Senate Republicans had gone to the White House to explain to Trump that he was going to be convicted, no avail. Trump made it clear to them, in not so many words that his simply living in the White House made him president, a sentiment best expressed by the legal saw that, “Possession is 9/10ths of the law.”
Finally, a post to Gab came out: “My so-called ‘conviction’ is the work of the Deep State and as such illegitimate. I remain president.”
This set off a chain of events, the likes of which Americans had never seen. Suddenly, everyone on Twitter became a Constitutional scholar as everyone studied the exact wording of the Constitution as to what happens if the president is removed from office by the Senate. The wording is quite clear: he or she is no longer president and that’s it.
Nowhere in the Constitution did it explain what to do if the president simply decided to ignore the Senate. What’s more, nowhere in the Constitution did it state what to do with the nuclear launch codes should a president be removed from office and he refuse to accept the decision of the Senate.
The next few hours were chilling as they were surreal for millions of people not just in the United States but around the globe. The issue of Trump’s physical access to America’s nuclear launch codes was suddenly at the forefront of everyone’s mind. Though it was finally announced that while the nuclear football remained in Trump’s possession, Sec. of Defense Mattis had ordered the American armed forces to stand down for the duration of the crisis.
Trump, on Twitter, was as defiant and unhinged as usual.He threatened to kill himself. He threatened to start a nuclear war. He vowed to declare martial law.
The usual suspects on cable news did their best to spin all of this for Trump. As an anxious nation waited for the now former president to leave the White House, a cavalcade of former Republican Senators and Trump White House staffers attempted to make the former president’s case. Their final argument was that for the good of the country, Trump should be allowed to remain president, despite his lawful conviction by the Senate.
Things began to move rapidly at this point.
Vice President Pence was sworn in but Chief Justice Roberts in a dark, somber event in the Old Executive Building. Meanwhile, it was learned Trump had quietly replaced his Secret Service detail with a private security force that made it clear it was prepared to defend Trump until the bloody end.
At this point, two things happened. A final bipartisan delegation of Congressional leaders came to the White House grounds under the flag of truce. During the course of an hour-long meeting, Trump screamed at them that they had never supported him and the world would be better off if it just ended instead of allowed the forces of the Deep State to ruin America. He made it absolutely clear that he would never leave the Oval Office willingly.
With that, they left.
Next, a surreal, bizarre event, the FBI slowly began to surround the White House. There was much debate online and on TV about how long the nation should wait for Trump to leave the White House. CNN went so far as to do a deep dive into the exact amount of food the White House grounds might have available at any one moment.
Finally, shots rang out from the White House as the battle was joined. It took several hours but in the end, the FBI was finally able to secure the facility. Nearly a dozen personnel on both sides died during the course of the Battle of The White House.
In what would become ionic footage, Trump was quietly escorted from the White House grounds. He spent the remainder of his days ranting on Twitter and Gab that he was the rightful president.
Today was different because it definitely felt we crossed the Rubicon when it came to public perception of what’s actually going on. It definitely seems as though a lot more people realize that it’s very possible a pandemic may strike the United States in the next few days. My fear right now, of course, is that it’ll show itself through a lot — a lot — of people getting sick to such an extent that we realize something horrible is going on.
Mardi Gras A lot of social events have happened in the States the last two months, so there’s no reason to think Mardi Gras is going to make any difference at this point. But given what’s happened to Iran, it does make you wonder if whenever the pandemic does finally strike the states — if it ever does — a lot people who get sick will have some connection to tonight’s Mardi Gras celebration. But, what do I know.
The Mad King Trump’s doing exactly what I have long predicted he would do — lie, lie, lie. So, he’s still in the first stage of may be his ultimate political demise. (Just kidding, he’s going to name himself Emperor Caligula II and force Ted Cruz to fuck a horse in the well of the Senate!) The second stage will be, of course, Trump freaking the fuck out. He’s going to go hysterical.
But, really, even that isn’t going to make any difference. What is likely to happen is Trump will go bonkers — maybe even bungle a limited nuclear exchange with the DPRK along the way — and he STILL will win re-election. The only thing that could possibly bring Trump down at this point is so horrific I barely want to think about it — millions of elderly people dying as part of The Gray Plague. That’s it. That’s the only way Trump will ever be removed from office other than him shuffling off this mortal coil in some peaceful fashion 10 years from now when he’s changed the Constitution and his doofus eldest son is the Crown Prince.
Or, the thinking behind the above rant is this. Trump is an avatar for some existential problems with the American Republic. In fact, Trump, personally, is the end of the Republic. So and Act of God that was both historically cruel and astonishing would have to happen that was so devastating to everyone, both Blue and Red that finally realized maybe having a Right wing celebrity Twitter troll as president MIGHT not be the best course of action right now. That’s never going to happen, so, lulz. See you in the Trump-branded ICE reeducation camp!
Europe It seem as though Europe — because of a major outbreak in northern Italy — may be about to implode. If Europe goes, then that’s yet another huge H-Bomb dropped on Trump’s precious stock market. The global economy simply won’t be able to hold up if China, South Korea, Japan, and Europe are no longer functioning, even if the US somehow miraculously manages to dodge a bullet because, I dunno, Trump is actually the second coming of Jesus H. Christ and is single-handedly warding off the Gray Plague by him being both man and God? If that’s NOT the case, then, well, lulz! Guess what, America, you’re in for a sharp — if brief — depression-type event.
The Global Economy I think because the fundamentals of the global economy are still sound, that any significant decline in the global economy will be sharp, but brief. I would say — just as a casual observer — that there are several major industries that are Dead Men Walking. Hollywood. Newspapers. A few others directly connected to social events. So, it’s at least possible that early 2021 will be a media wasteland while we wait for AR, VR and MX in general to spring into the gap left by all those empty movie theatres.
WARS & Rumors of WARS It seems to me that if my fears come true about the amount of pandemic chaos caused by COV19 that there’s a good chance there could be as many as four regional wars in the next few months. Russia-Ukraine / Iran – Israel / India – Pakistan / DPRK – ROK. That’s pretty much the absolute worst case scenario, but it’s reasonable to assume that the liberal global order that’s existed since 1945 is just about on its knees as it is because of fucking Trump and so a pandemic would likely push us into the void again until we straightened things out. Or, put another way, it might not even be COV19 that kills the most people in the next, say, 18 months, but rather all the fucking wars it causes. Which would flip the script from 100 years ago when it was the Spanish Flu that killed a lot of people during The Great War.
Iceland To date, my fears about Iceland haven’t come true. So, maybe they won’t. Maybe my notion that it would be Iceland that sufferent for the sins of our for profit healthcare system may prove to be unfounded. I really like Iceland. So, I hope I’m wrong. Their tiny little Nordic nation wouldn’t deserve to be brought to its knees because Americans would rather go to their country that pay for a doctor’s visit.
Iran I don’t know what the fuck is going on with Iran. It seems the worst off of any nation outside of the China hotzone. It definitely seems as though Iran may be in contention for the first nation to face actual political change becasue of COVID19. That, in itself, would be historic. That Iran is now being consumed by COVID19 definitely indicates that the major social events that occured in Iran over the last two months probably led us to this point. Given that the Grammys, the Oscars, impeachment and the Superbowl all happened in the United States during that same time period is enough to give one pause for thought. Add to that the surreal lack of cases in the States and…whoa buddy.
My birthday is Feb 26th. I would prefer it not be seen as a 9/11-type moment in our nation’s history when we all wake up to the cold hard fact that 60% of the American population is too sick to move.
Great risk brings great opportunity.Shelton Bumgarner
by Shelt Garner @sheltgarner
When I heard Trump was going to fucking India today, I thought it was some sort of joke. You could not write a worst scenario — the president not only leaves the country just as a cases of a pandemic may be about to strike the country in a big way, he goes to a nation that may get one very soon itself.
It’s the setup for a nightmare scenario whereby POTUS is out of the country when the pandemic strikes with 9/11 level force and that’s just the beginning of the process of pandemic. Imagine if 9/11 happened while Bush had been in India. And what if Bush was on the edge of losing his mind, anyway? How would that have worked out? It makes you wonder who our “Rudy” will be? I think it depends a lot on where the first hot and warm zones are. It could be NYC Mayor De Blasio if things work out. But one thing is for sure, 9/11 proved that the need for leadership is almost it’s own force — it will find someone, somewhere to pick up the slack when it’s not there at the top.
I’m reminded of a number of pop culture scenes of sudden mass chaos. The War of The Worlds and Cell both have scenes in them that give us some sense of how fragile and thin our grasp on civilization is. And, really, that’s what the first “phase” of the process of 3W (World War WuFlu) would be like. That would be when, because, well, Trump is a deranged moron and Twitter liberals have been willfully oblivious about what’s going on outside of the States right now, we all get on the same page as to the crisis the nation now faces.
One thing that bothers me is how people are engaging in fear porn on Twitter without at least trying to articulate what their fears are. It’s not going to be a movie. It’s real life. So, even if the absolute worst happens — and it may — life will keep going. Life will find a way. Those with hope, tenacity and vision wills survive and prosper if fate shines its eyes on them. People who panic and run around like a chicken with their heads cut off, not so much.
So don’t panic. Believe. Keep the faith. Fight the good fight.
I’m pretty good at strategic thinking. That’s my thing. So, let’s wargame the consequences of a major pandemic in the next, say, 28 days. The first thing we have to understand is such a pandemic would be the biggest historical event not since 9/11, but since August, 1945 — the end of World War II. As such, initially, the entire global order would likely lock up and collapse in the beginning stages of the process for lack of institutional memory as to handle such a situation, if nothing else.
My real concern at the moment is the “beginning” of the pandemic won’t be marked by what’s currently happening in Wuhan, but whenever there are reports of multiple “warm zones” across the United States all at once. Initially, CNN’s gut reaction will be to market it as a 9/11 Redux, when, in fact, it’s more like WWII redux — a world war against WuFlu (WWW) if you will. (You might call it WWX, but, then, people would confuse it with World War 10.)
Once we actually descended into the process of pandemic, the first event would be mass chaos the likes of which we’ve never seen in modern American history. Yes, 9/11 caused a lot of chaos, but that was one fucking day! Imagine two weeks of such chaos as we all figured out the “new normal” of the essentials of life being – for the time being — of dubious supply. Add to this that Trump is nothing more than a deranged version of Being There’s Chauncey Gardner and, well, Flughazi! If the entire country turns its eyes to Trump and he goes full Col. Kurtz on us and just tweets all day in his bunker behind Mt. Rushmore as three regional wars erupt, go nuclear and even involve the US (Hi, Little Rocket Man!) then, well, there might (?) finally be some political consequences for House Trump? Maybe? MAYBE?
The great tragedy of it FLUGHAZI would be that it would be sometime in 2021 or 2022 before we recovered enough to get around to impeaching and convicting Trump for FLUGHAZI and by that point, lulz! I do, however, doubt the United States (or Russia or China) will make it through a serious pandemic. Just like during the 1914-1945 period, empires will rise and fall if history woke up and ran around in traffic for a few months.
Anyway, the point is — you could not write a worst case scenario if we go full pandemic in the next 28 days. Heroes will be made. Cowards will be shamed. We all remember them all. It is at least within the realm of possibility that not only will we lop of the existing old codger power structure of much of the world, but some pretty astonishing historical figures will pop out of nowhere for no other reason than are giving the opportunity to prove their true personal valor (or lack thereof.)
I hope none of that happens, I really do. But there’s at least a chance that 2021 pop songs are going to be pretty serious songs about love and love lost for tragic reasons. Maybe rock will come back. That would be cool. Sigh.
But we’ve still not reached the tipping point. There’s no narrative to any of this. I have no idea what’s going on. I can’t even formulate an educated opinion at this point.
It seems to me that Twitter Liberals are embarrassing themselves right now. WuFlu is whipping around the global at an alarming rate and they’re so obsessed with giving us hottakes on the 2020 Campaign that they’re completely oblivious to what’s going on.
What really bothers me is MAGA seems very excited at the prospect of a pandemic. I don’t know what the hell is going on with them at that level. Anyway, if things get as bad as I fear, we’re going to have to start seeing each other as patriots, citizens and humans, not Blue and Red. If we don’t do that sooner rather than later, well, we’re fucked. A lot of people might do for no reason if we don’t get our act together.
The key thing is, we’re not ready on a number of different levels. And one of those levels is the media. If the States finally got sucked into the pandemic blackhole, then CNN would initially try to market it as a 9/11 type event, when, in fact, it won’t be an event at all, but rather a process. It would be more like a war than a battle, in other words. The American press hasn’t had to cover a war in real terms like the one we might face since WWII and so there’s no institutional memory as to what to do. There’s likely to be something of a learning curve for a lot of people.
But that’s the worst case. I think we’ll be fine. The key issue is, how bad do things have to get for us to stop seeing the process through the prism of surreal partisan politics? Probably far worst than we might realize. I’ve always said the only way we’ll get rid of Trump is something “extra political” and gross mismanagement of a pandemic seems to fit the bill. In other words, if Trump completely loses his mind because of a pandemic then, if we survive as a nation and a species, then, well, maybe four Republican senators might vote for witnesses? Oh, sorry, wrong clusterfuck.
For me, the big issue is this chart.
Yikes!
If we have a “Gray Plague” and 3.6% – 15% of the population over 60 croaks rather abruptly, well, that’s a lot of pretty powerful people who run the world right now. That would be the stuff of some pretty astonishing historical change in a very short amount of time. This weekend is crucial. If things clam down by Sunday, then we can go back to cursing the bred and worrying about the Fourth Reich.
For about four years now, I have been telling anyone who will listen that I think Donald Trump is an existential threat to the Republic. The last few days have pretty much proven my case. It’s rare that I look out in the blue winter sky and wonder if I’m going to see a DPRK ICBM in the sky, heading to nearby-ish DC.
I have even begun to pace out how I would know it had happened. The EMP burst would zap all electronics in the general area of the nuclear blast and so, well, nothing would work. I have thought about how many sites the DPRK would target and the likelihood they would actually be able to blow them up. I love Koreans, but they have no “medium” switch on a cultural level. So if president crazypants managed to get them to the point where they wanted to take us down with them, then, then they would probably shoot as many as five ICBMs towards us. They have a pretty nice H-bomb arsenal at this point and the means to deliver them across the entire United States.
But they haven’t really had a chance to test the whole system, so there’s a good chance what would really happen is we would all collectively shit our pants at how fucking close we came to 10+ million dead (at least) in the United States alone. We aren’t really prepared on a psychological or emotional level to deal with THAT many dead in the context of civilization continue to exist. But that would be a real possibility — as long as the Chinese and Russians sat on their hands, any nuclear war between the DPRK and US would be on the low end of a “limited exchange.” Given how fucking bonkers Trump is, of course, he would probably nuke the North Koreans out of existence using not just tactical nukes but h-bombs. You could probably turn most of North Korea into an unlivable radioactive hellscape with as few as 5 h-bombs. Think about that. That’s pretty deep.
The point is, however, that we’re definitely lurching towards what I’ve suggested all along — things are going to get so extreme and so surreal pretty soon that we’re going to learn a lot not just ourselves as a people but something pretty basic about our nation as a whole. If there’s nothing Trump can do that will lesson his support for any reason, what happens if he get’s so bad on a mental level that we all start to think maybe we’re entering The Dead Zone. Maybe the reason there’s no intelligent life in the universe is inevitably an ET Donald Trump pops up and blows the planet to bits? Is it possible that Trump’s not just an existential threat to the Republic, he’s an existential threat to the species?
I suspect that we’re just fucked. MAGA just needs Trump cognizant enough to make it into his second term. That’s it. By that point his new Veep — The Kooch, Kris Kobach, Tom Cotton, Tucker Carlson or Don Jr? — will be in place to pick up the slack. So I fully expect one of the scenarios we face is Trump uses any war in the Middle East to win re-election and the he promptly turns into a psychological puddle and we get the American Hitler we’ve all been expecting in Trump.
I just can’t see ANYTHING that will force Trump out of office for any reason other than a peaceful death sometime in the next 10 years. He’s just one tweet away from demanding a Constitutional Convention to “pass a balanced budget amendment.” He will get it, they will go rouge and pass Enabling Acts on a Constitutional level and I die in an ICE camp sometime in the next two to three years. Lulz!
Another, far darker scenario is Trump doesn’t make that far. He manages to crater on a psychological level not when MAGA needs him to (any point after Jan 20, 2021) but, say, sometime in the January-October time frame. If things get as mindblowingly surreal as fear, Republicans will have three lines of defense, 1) Let the people decide 2) If only we back off and give him some space, he’ll make America Great Again 3) The Pence Piviot.
The last one is one of the more clever moves they might use. If things get so absolutely extreme that the Republican Lizard People finally face the unthinkable of having to admit that, well, maybe Trump really WAS a worse choice than Hillary Clinton, they will simply say that Trump needs his rest and Pence is making sure Trump’s vision of America (ugh) becomes a reality. We’re safe because of Pence, in other words.
But let’s say that doesn’t work. Then what. What if what I’ve mulled before happens. I mean, what if Trump really finally flips his lid — and in the middle of a major regional war in the Middle East, no less! Then what. Poor old Hugh Hewitt’s brain may break. If you’re such a cockholster for The Dear Leader and finally reality comes crashing into the situation in a way that even you can’t spin or deny, then, well, things are going to get fucking lit. A lot of smart, educated grown-ass men have debased themselves absolutely for the sake of Trump and every day Trump gets worse and more dangerous for not just America but the FUCKING WORLD.
The single most surreal event of my life will be if Dennis Prager+Hugh Hewitt+Matt Schlapp get on TV and have a complete, total mental and emotional breakdown when, like The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy, they realize they hitched their “lives and scared honors” to the wrong guy. This is unlikely to happen, but thinking about it happening is kind of chilling. That level of bonkers behavior on the part of a “public intellectual” would be rather disturbing.
Only if, say, a few million people died and everyone blamed Trump for it could I see that happening. In real terms, those guys have gotten what they wanted from Trump — a tax cut and young, hack MAGA judges. They have no shame and our media ecosystem is so broken that the moment Trump is no longer politically viable, they’ll change their tune in mid-conversation and act as if nothing happened. Fuck those liars.
Anyway, I generally don’t think any that extreme is going to happen. Far more likely is Trump will always be just on the cusp of losing his mind and yet never quite get so bad that Nancy Pelosi strikes by sending the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate so they can be used essentially as the 25th Amendment. He will drift into his second term and The Kooch (or whomever) will be the person who puts me in a camp and is indirectly responsible for my death in American Killing Fields. (In upstate New York maybe?)
It is growing more apparent on a daily basis that Trump is losing his fucking mind. Now, if he was still a Right wing celebrity Twitter troll then this would not be a big deal. It would be dealt with in private and Access Hollywood might made a passing reference to Trump retiring from public life to “spend time with his family.”
But, fuck, man, the guy’s president. So, it does not take much to pace out a scenario where Trump is so out of it that out that out of sheer incompetence there’s some sort of “limited”nuclear exchange between the DPRK and the States. The only reason it would be “limited” is if for some reason Russia and China sat on their hands and watched the whole thing go down.
It could go down like this — Trump is so totally out of it that he boxes in Kim for no damn reason. Things get really, really tense and Kim feels he has no choice on an existential level but to take down as much of the States as he can. Kim lobs a few ICBMs at the States, maybe blowing up — if he’s “lucky” LA, Chicago, DC or NYC. I have my doubts on how many of the intended targets would actually be successfully struck. Remember, it’s generally assumed that the DPRK has H-Bombs, so in theory we’re talking a citykiller bomb exploding over Hollywood or Wall Street.
Trump nukes the shit out of the DPRK and that’s that.
Several million (5+) people are dead and we, at last, end Trump’s reign. Though, it is just as likely that we’re already in the dystopia and, well, even though Trump gross incompetence was the reason for a few million American deaths, this will be used to abolish the Constitution and, well, we’re just as fucked as we would be anyway.
All I know is it’s self-evident, at least from Trump’s Twitter feed, that he’s not well and he’s getting worse every day.
Remember, war doesn’t happen in a vacuum. If, say, Iran and Israel go at it and Israel uses a few nukes on Iran, that would likely be such a staggering historic event that both the Indian subcontinent AND the two Koreas may go poof (and take a us with them.)
I am not one for personality cults, regardless of ideology. Just not my scene. And I continue to believe that Nancy Pelosi had no plan when it came to Trump’s creeping tyranny — she was just lucky when his natural tendency to self-own finally happened to get bad enough that he was impeached. She had no idea when this would inevitably happen. We could be in the middle of his second term and still be waiting. Pelosi probably knew he would do it, but she had no “plan.” It was all just dumb luck. I, for one, would rather NOT have the fate of the Republic hinge on dumb luck. She could have been a LOT more aggressive on the Mueller front in January 2019, but did nothing.
Anyway, here we are.
It definitely seems as though Pelosi not giving something Trump assumed was his — easy “vindication” in the Senate — is beginning to eat away at him. So, it’s at least possible that Pelosi had a hunch this would happen. It’s at least possible that this IS a part of a “plan.” Now, again, we simply don’t know when — if ever — Trump is going to snap because of this Tell-Tale Heart situation. It may never happen. Trump runs on “vindication” no matter what, cruises into his second term, get a Constitutional Convention convened to “pass a balanced budget amendment” and away we go.
But there’s also a chance that Trump’s feeling of powerless may get the best of him in a pretty astonishing fashion. He may just lose his shit so bad that it’s THAT that leads to his conviction in the Senate. He finally becomes such a ranting insane person that Pelosi strikes — she sends the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate and Trump’s removed from office not for any political reasons but because the 25th Amendment is a dead letter.
There is the risk, of course, that given how fucked up MAGA is, they could very well simply use this theory of mine as their “stab in the back.” In other words, they will whip themselves up into an apoplectic trance at the idea that if ONLY Nancy Pelosi hadn’t driven the Dear Leader bonkers, there could have been a Golden Age of American Nazism or some such bullshit. Fuck those guys. Fucking Nazis.
Anyway, here’s some other relevant writing I’ve done on this matter.
I hate to break it to you, folks, but if impeachment really does reach a tipping point we’ve entered the darkest timeline. It won’t be impeachment, it will be Trump’s reaction to it that we’ll be talking about.
Trump has long had some sort of chronic mental problem. The stress of simply an impeachment investigation — which would likely take months — would, in it self, potentially cause him to decompensate. It’s would make a lot of sense if Trump found himself in something of a logic trap. He would absolutely feel as though he would survive an Senate vote. But he would also absolutely feel paranoid that he might not.
So he goes bonkers.
I therefore propose that in the end, it won’t even be impeachment that is Trump’s downfall — it will be his reaction to it. If Trump finally goes off the deep end, some astonishing surreal thing will happen. The first will be MAGA Stalwarts will find themselves defending ever-more demonstrably indefensible things on Trump’s part. First they will simply say he was “joking.” But there will come a point when they take the final plunge into their own destruction. Trump will tweet out a dick pic. Trump will begin to tweet out the N-word to Obama. And they will defend it, thinking that Trump, like always, will stay in control of the narrative.
And so, in the end, Trump’s tendency to self-own will get so absolutely bad that there might be an intervention, of sorts. They might propose to Trump that he gets to choose Pence’s replacement as veep. And maybe a promise of a full pardon after Pence wins re-election in 2020. Trump accepting such an offer would be the best case scenario for Republicans.
The worse case scenario is he won’t accept it. And in the end, Trump so far gone mentally that the Senate finally does, in fact, convict him not so much because of any particular crime, but for the complete failure of the 25th Amendment to work.
And then, I’m afraid, we have a once-in-generation event. Young people won’t reference 9/11, they’ll reference Trump’s downfall. It will probably play out a lot like the OJ’s slow motion police chase in a white Bronco. It will last days, even weeks. The entire country will grind to a halt as we attempt to lure Trump out of The White House.
It will be a dark day in our history.
Here is how it may play out. I wrote this some time ago, but the premise is the same.
9/10ths a story fragment of a possible near future by Shelton Bumgarner
April, 2019
The eyes of the world were on the White House.
Just moments before, President Donald J. Trump, 45th president of the United States, had been convicted by 67 members of the Senate for a whole list of high crimes and misdemeanors. Trump had for weeks now been ranting on Gab about his case in the Senate, bouncing back and forth between threats to start a war with Iran or the DPRK and not-so-subtle hints that he might take his own life should he be convicted by the Senate.
And, now, at last, the moment of truth had arrived.
Trump legally, at least, was no longer president, but he had been oddly silent since the verdict had been announced with great fanfare from the well of the Senate. Trump’s conviction had come after months of investigations on the part of the now Democratic Congress. The length and breath of Trump’s malfeasance discovered by these hearings had rocked the nation to its very core. On more than one occasion, MAGA talking heads on cable news had been interrupted by astonishing breaking news that left them, for once, unable or unwilling to defend the president.
The hearings had ground on for months to such an extent that Trump’s approval had slowly drifted to the 20s and stayed there consistently. Trump’s support was now made up of the very rich and the very poor. Oddly, despite Trump’s near constant demands on Twitter for violence on the part of his supporters, little, if any was reported. Trump had grown so frustrated that he had all but abandoned Twitter at one point for the more receptive Gab social media platform. Though on more than one occasion Rudy Giuliani had made it very clear it was within the rights of the president to declare martial law if he deemed it in the best interests of the nation. More than one delegation of Senate Republicans had gone to the White House to explain to Trump that he was going to be convicted, no avail. Trump made it clear to them, in not so many words that his simply living in the White House made him president, a sentiment best expressed by the legal saw that, “Possession is 9/10ths of the law.”
Finally, a post to Gab came out: “My so-called ‘conviction’ is the work of the Deep State and as such illegitimate. I remain president.”
This set off a chain of events, the likes of which Americans had never seen. Suddenly, everyone on Twitter became a Constitutional scholar as everyone studied the exact wording of the Constitution as to what happens if the president is removed from office by the Senate. The wording is quite clear: he or she is no longer president and that’s it.
Nowhere in the Constitution did it explain what to do if the president simply decided to ignore the Senate. What’s more, nowhere in the Constitution did it state what to do with the nuclear launch codes should a president be removed from office and he refuse to accept the decision of the Senate.
The next few hours were chilling as they were surreal for millions of people not just in the United States but around the globe. The issue of Trump’s physical access to America’s nuclear launch codes was suddenly at the forefront of everyone’s mind. Though it was finally announced that while the nuclear football remained in Trump’s possession, Sec. of Defense Mattis had ordered the American armed forces to stand down for the duration of the crisis.
Trump, on Twitter, was as defiant and unhinged as usual.He threatened to kill himself. He threatened to start a nuclear war. He vowed to declare martial law.
The usual suspects on cable news did their best to spin all of this for Trump. As an anxious nation waited for the now former president to leave the White House, a cavalcade of former Republican Senators and Trump White House staffers attempted to make the former president’s case. Their final argument was that for the good of the country, Trump should be allowed to remain president, despite his lawful conviction by the Senate.
Things began to move rapidly at this point.
Vice President Pence was sworn in but Chief Justice Roberts in a dark, somber event in the Old Executive Building. Meanwhile, it was learned Trump had quietly replaced his Secret Service detail with a private security force that made it clear it was prepared to defend Trump until the bloody end.
At this point, two things happened. A final bipartisan delegation of Congressional leaders came to the White House grounds under the flag of truce. During the course of an hour-long meeting, Trump screamed at them that they had never supported him and the world would be better off if it just ended instead of allowed the forces of the Deep State to ruin America. He made it absolutely clear that he would never leave the Oval Office willingly.
With that, they left.
Next, a surreal, bizarre event, the FBI slowly began to surround the White House. There was much debate online and on TV about how long the nation should wait for Trump to leave the White House. CNN went so far as to do a deep dive into the exact amount of food the White House grounds might have available at any one moment.
Finally, shots rang out from the White House as the battle was joined. It took several hours but in the end, the FBI was finally able to secure the facility. Nearly a dozen personnel on both sides died during the course of the Battle of The White House.
In what would become ionic footage, Trump was quietly escorted from the White House grounds. He spent the remainder of his days ranting on Twitter and Gab that he was the rightful president.
There comes a point when you have to finally admit that the Trump is not a cause, but a symptom of deep-seated, existential problems with the United States’ political system. As such, the moment Trump’s acquitted by the Senate, the Republic has effectively fallen.
At that point, it’s simply a matter of how bad things get and for how long. This is when you have to take a deep breath and realize that there’s a real risk that MAGA will rapidly mutate and go full Nazi very, very soon. If The Kooch or Kris Kobach becomes Trump’s Veep, not Pence, this is all but assured. All Republicans have to do is get Trump past Election Day 2020 and they’re set for a generation, if not more.
They can weaponize ICE camps, round up everyone they don’t like and start the American Killing Fields. I wish this was hyperbole, but, alas, it’s not. It’ll happen in fits and starts, but it will happen. Once Trump — or his successor — starts ranting about the need for a Constitutional Convention to “pass a balanced budget amendment,” then, well, American Carnage is here for good.
There are any number of really dark scenarios you could pace out at that point. The literal end of the world. Millions dead. A Thousand Year Trump that lasts at least until global climate change shakes things up enough that the regime buckles.
I wrote all that to lay out what I believe will, in fact, happen, over the course of the next few years. But there’s one major unknown unknown — Trump’s mental state. It’s rather dark and tragic that in the short term, the only way that the Republic stands is not because we all come to our senses, but because Trump loses his so quickly — and manages to bring Pence down with him in a very quick series of events — that President Pelosi serves as a caretaker president simply for there to be a free and fair election in 2020. But that is so completely unknown — he could simply be a puddle in 20202 and still re-election — that I would not bet on it as saving us.
But it is, at least, something to think about. I just hope ICE lets me finish the novel I’m writing before they drag me out of my bed in the middle of the night.
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