by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
A number of different things are happening at the same time. One issue is that several different macro trends in American politics have come to a head. The rage that 38% of the electorate feels about the changing nature of American society combined with how white working class men can’t get laid has led to significant rot in the American political system.
Red State rural areas and Blue State urban areas simply have a fundamental difference of opinion about what constitutes America. MAGA and MAGA friendly people think that by definition to be conservative is to risk being “canceled” — have their life ruined — for simply being conservative. And that, is the source of a lot of the rage and willful ignorance on the part of such people.
There are a number of pretty huge problems standing in the way of MAGA getting want they apparently want right now — 4 more years of Trumplandia. The biggest obstacle to this goal, ironically enough, is Trump himself. If he struck in some autocratic fashion before the election was called — or even before the election — then he probably would have gotten away with it. There are many, many different autocratic things he could have done that would have allowed him to stay in office to varying degrees of success.
But he didn’t do any of them and now that the Electoral College has voted, it’s now much, much harder for Rudy to use his usual disinformation techniques to run slipshod over democracy since we’re now, again, in a political crisis. The reason we’re in a political crisis — even if we don’t see it for that — is only through extra-political measures can Trump stay in power.
Or, put another way, the soft coup techniques he used in the courts recently would have to be replaced by hard coup techniques of an actual autocrat. But there are a lot — a lot — of problems for Trump going forward to pull such a thing off.
Many of his followers are begging Trump to go full-autocrat and declare martial law, or what have you. But there’s an important element of this they miss — Trump can’t just do this out of the blue. If he did — no one would follow his order.
What he COULD do, is goad his followers into some sort of Reichstag Fire event which he could then, in turn, use to invoke the Insurrection Act and attempt to maybe stay in power no matter what. But, again, even then, now that the Electoral College has voted…that’s a pretty dubious strategy. Even if something happened out of the blue — like a war with Iran or the DPRK or a coordinated series of political killings or Oklahoma City type bombings — Trump’s time in office is growing to an end.
Really, it seems to me Trump has one ace up his sleeve — in a sense: he could just snap and go completely fucking bonkers and thrash around, trying to destroy the country as much as possible on his way out. There are any number of pretty insane things he could do. He could start tweeting about how Red states need to leave the Union before January 20th. He could attempt to arrest any number of people he doesn’t like as a negotiating tactic so HE doesn’t go to prison after he leaves office.
But, remember, pretty much at any moment now, some pretty lit extra-political events might happen because Trump is hoping he can win in Congress Jan. 6th because that’s a POLITICAL event.
And, yet, I’ve overestimated Trump’s actual political ability so many times over the years, that what’s more likely to happen is we’re just going to drift into the Biden Era. Things will be in political neutral for about two years until the House flips and Biden is impeached for Hunter Biden’s laptop (or whatever) and there will be a lot — a lot — of surreal political discourse as suddenly our political norms snap back into place while, at the same time, Trump keeps doing what he’s always been doing an we just shrug.
Like we always do.
But there is a good chance that the weeks leading up to Jan. 20th are going to be unpredictable, unstable and extremely bumpy. How, exactly, all the plays out is anyone’s guess.
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