I’m a nobody. I don’t know anything. Ignore me. I’m a crank. A hayseed rube in the middle of nowhere who Maggie Haberman called out on Twitter for not knowing anything about (access) journalism.
I am all those things.
I am also, however, someone who believes reality is very important.When otherwise “normal” people who wouldn’t sit next to me in a Manhattan coffee shop act rather delusional I grow concerned. This brings us to COVID19.
The Masters of The Universe who make $20 million bonus in a year are living in a dreamland of their own making. It wouldn’t be so bad if there was some sort of doubt about the situation, but there is none — a huge domestic crisis is careening towards the United States and “Dow Joans,” as POTUS recently called Wall Street, is living in a very weird denial. I am well aware that the fundamentals are fine, but so were the Titanic’s until it struck a fucking iceberg.
The crazy thing is it’s empirical that what’s going on in Italy, South Korea and Iran IS GOING TO HAPPEN IN THE UNITED STATES WITHIN TWO WEEKS. What’s more, for a number of worst-case-scenario reasons, we’re not doing anything to mitigate the situation. By the time we do, in a terrified spasm, it’ll be way too late.
What happens — probably around The Ides of March — is going to be like a real life horror movie. So many people will be sick — and so many elderly people will be dying in quick succession — that it goes without saying that the economy is going, for the short term at least, lock up and collapse. Let me be clear — this is not finance advice. Why would anyone listen to me? Maggie Haberman thinks I’m a crank.
I would note, however, that if I had any money — which I don’t — I would probably (glup) be looking at Bitcoin. I also would ever-so-slowly cash out and look for something that might actually do me some good in a short — if severe — crisis. If I was ultra-rich, I would hide out in one of those doomsday bunkers I keep hearing about. (Of course, as a poor, I have I vested interest in this because, lulz, it’s easier to seize rich people’s property if they’re doing rails on tails off of some whore’s asshole in a doomsday bunker and not paying any attention to the revolution taking place in the real world.
Do I really think it will get that bad, though?
Sorta.
I do think the United States’ economy is going to crash very, very soon, for no other reason than we’re going to be sucker punched by COVID19 in a rather dramatic fashion. It will be like a real-life horror movie without the zombies. But it will be real life and so, as such, we’ll make it through it. Though it will be mentioned in the same breath as the Civil War and WW2.
If it makes the Masters of the Universe feel better, once we finally get everything sorted out in about a year, we’re likely to have a post-Civil War level boom. A huge amount of money will be made because of the “creative destruction’ associated with what just happened. It will be a tragedy. Some pretty wild things may happen — not all of them beneficial to plutocrats — but it’s possible Millennials will stop killing industries and start making them.
But I guess, for me, the issue is we have to prepare for the boil to be sliced. We have to prepare for all hell to break loose in a rather Pearl Harbor kind of a way.
So, if Trump snaps because his absolute need to win smashing against his absolute realization that he’s going to be blamed for a royal clusterfuck of a response to the biggest domestic American crisis since the Civil War, how bad will things get?
Well, first, things may sort themselves out. No one can predict the future. Maybe it really is “just the flu,” or at least the bullshit coming from House Trump will work with the base. It will work with the base and the “German Industrialists” will continue to buy stocks no matter what and Trump will get his Thousand Year Trump. The Fourth Reich will consolidate its power and I endup with a Trump-brand bullet in the back of my head sometime in Trump’s second term at my local ICE camp.
But, for shits and giggles, let’s just play pretend. I know it’s hard to believe, but let’s assume that, work with me here, Trump finally faces some political accountability for being a fucking criminally incompetent traitor racist bigot misogynist who is only powered by greed, hate and a bloodlust for power and not the interests of the Constitution. What happens then?
One of two things: either Trump implodes or he explodes on a mental level.
Implosion If Trump implodes, we just won’t see him that much. He’ll go full Howard Hughes on us. He might be able to summon enough energy to come out and talk about what’s going on, but in general will see Pence a whole lot more. Like, a whole lot more. And, it’s possible that weirdly the government starts to function better as if someone else is running it. There might even be some personal changes that mysteriously happen out of the blue. And Pence isn’t fired for the second term is widely assume he will be. Trump’s second term is just as bad as we all assume it will be, but by about 2022 it definitely will seem as if Trump has effectively given control over to Pence. A huge political fight breaks out between Pence and Doofus Don Jr as Don Jr has a political reason to expose what is really happening — the United States doesn’t have a functioning president.
Explosion This is less likely to happen, but if it did, it would happen because the short term events on the ground had gotten far worse than we expected. Trump will snap in a rather dramatic fashion. He will go transnational in his bonkers state. A lot of things that have been rolling around in his head since he became office will happen. He’ll pardon everyone he wants to pardon — including himself. He’ll whip his cock out and stroke it to completion. He’ll use the Presidential Alert System to shoot out dickpics and tweets all day long. He’ll probably get extremely passive-aggressive on Twitter an talk about how we all hate him and want him to kill himself. (We don’t.) It will get really, really bad.
Now, what the political consequences of this would be, I don’t know. It could be that we might just summon up the political courage — at last — to have something of a snap impeachment-and-conviction. But events on the ground would have be so existentially bad that the usual Trump enablers would have abandoned him in a big, big way.
I had an illuminating little encounter today. I saw two Virginia State Troopers at a fast food place and I decided to talk to them about what I felt was the coming COVID19 crisis. I was a bit taken aback not only by how fucking arrogant and dismissive they were, but how the one who spoke to me pretty much towed House Trump’s official imperial line about what’s going on: “a media hoax.”
So two men who are likely to be at the forefront of what could be the biggest domestic crisis in our nation’s history since the Civil War were lulzing it because The Dear Leader is a comically deranged mixture of Chauncey Gardner and Zoolander. While, yes, Trump may have meant the media was “weaponizing” their coverage of COVID19 because they wanted to hurt his fee-fees, a lot of his followers HEARD WHAT HE SAID: nothing to worry about, it’s a hoax.
Anyway, I’m starting to think House Trump is going to get away with doing to COVID19 what they did with The Mueller Report — lie and hide the truth until politically they escape any consequence again. It’s the idea that House Trump might face some political consequence for their criminal incompetence, more than any blood lust about hoping to see “millions die”that people like me want when it comes to COVID19. And, I think, on an gut level, even the Doofus Crown Prince Don Jr. knows that and hence he lashes out — he knows that if that actually happened, the whole thing could come tumbling down. At least in the short term. That prospect frightens him so much — and he’s a complete moron — that he lashes out and says demostrably hateful, stupid things in an effort to whip the base up into a frenzy so they’ll vote for him in 2024 should God Emperor Trump I decide to step down rather than rule as Emperor For Eternity.
So, there’s a good chance that rather than face any accountability, the criminally incompetence House Trump will mindfuck America like we’re China or something. They won’t tell us how many tests are available. If the have the power to hide any information that will hurt them politically, they will, damn the consequences or additional loss of life. As long as the stockmarket is stable and Trump wins re-election, everything is a lulz. The base will remain willfully ignorant of how many of their loved ones could have been saved and if there’s any scandal, it won’t be until the general 2021 – 2023 time frame before it happens. House Trump installs its OWN Deep State and Vice President Don Jr. becomes president should Emperor Trump 1 of Trumplandia dain to step down for any reason whatsoever.
I honestly don’t see how both the worst case scenario happens AND us being just as fucked as we would have been had none of this have happened won’t happen. Many more people than need be will get sick and maybe die AND House Trump will establish the Thousand Year Trump. They’re just too craven, too willing to do anything to win for that not to happen.
Of note — Trump has said at least once that COVID19 is going to “miraculous” vanish in April. This is what’s going on: an expert told him it’s likely COVID19, like the flu, will retreat in the spring, just like the normal flu. It isn’t really going anywhere — just like the Spanish Flu, it will be back in the fall. But Trump will crow that he was right. In fact, he will make it the centerpiece of his re-election campaign. The fact that COVID19 would then be ravaging the Southern Hemisphere won’t matter to him. In fact, he will probably know that and when it comes back just int time for an “October Surprise” he will use it blame Democrats and / or suspend the election and never fucking leave office.
Again, if you think all of this is me having “Trump Derangement Disorder,” I want YOU, PERSONALLY, to eat shit. It’s the least I can say since it’s demonstrable that House Trump is criminally incompetence and a lot of people — many of them elderly MAGA people — will die unnecessarily because Trump doesn’t want to face any real political accountability. House Trump is already censoring the number of tests given and they could go so far as to make the results classified at some point in the near future.
An alarming thing I’ve seen on Twitter very recently is some scientific evidence that COVID19 has been in Washington state, at least, for about six weeks. If it’s been in Washington for six weeks, it’s been bouncing around the United States for six weeks.
So, I would suggest, when the first wave of test results across the country begin to be reported, we may have, on a psychological level, something of a Pearl Harbor moment. But it won’t be the beginning of WW3, it’ll be the beginning of 3WW — the World War WuFlu.
Now, if that is, in fact, the case, the entire dynamic of American politics will change rather rapidly. Americans in ital reaction would be to “rally round the flag.” But, of course, Trump on an existential level is a divider, not a uniter and, as such, his usual demagogic bullshit won’t work. You can’t gaslight a pandemic. I guess you can try, but it’s difficult. The usual Stormy Daniels’ Playbook of having Rudy come out to admit everything to “normalize” criminal behavior just won’t cut it.
So what would all of this mean on a practical level? Well, if Trump’s worst nightmare happened — the stock market cratered and he was blamed for it, then either he implodes or explodes. Either he crumples rather dramatically and we’re effectively leaderless during the greatest domestic crisis since the Civil War, or he goes complete nuts and does — or tries to do — some rather insane things.
Trump implodes I could see the administration have something of a spasm of panic where by the usual corruption and incompetence is replaced with a sudden need to use things that Trump hates: science, facts and unconditional bi-partisanship. As such, MAGA apologists like Rick Santorm and Hugh Hewitt might rather abruptly change their tune out of desperation. Like, for the duration of the crisis while it’s an absolute political necessity, they might not try to score short term pontifical points or defend the indefensibly — they may start to act like normal human beings. They might, for once, unequivocally state what is demonstrably, factually true: the emperor has no clothes. They will, at last, pull their head out of Trump’s ass and weirdly want to do whatever it necessary to save as many lives as possible. If it happens as abruptly as I suspect, we all may look at CNN or MSNBC and drop our coffee cup in shock.
But for that to happen, things would have to get rather Biblical in their nature. Like The End Times Are Here Bad. Suddenly Trump and his toadies will be honest for once. They will beg for the very people they have scream at for four years — qualified women and minorities, scientists, you name it — to help them save the country, and, by extension, themselves. The moment they feel safe, these MAGA shitheads will turn around and go back to screaming at these people for being scary.
There is the other option: Trump, on a mental level, explodes. He goes complete nuts. He orders anyone who will listen to do what are obviously illegal things. He suspends the Constitution. He shuts down the Internet. He locks down the border. He orders the Air Force to shoot down passenger planes. You name it. This would pose something of a problem for our political system, especially if he starts to order the MAGA base to kill people he doesn’t like or if he goes so nuts that he begins to use the “Presidential Alert System” to send us all his tweets and cockpics.
This raises the question — what, exactly, COULD we do about it? Both impeachment and the 25 Amendment are now effectively non-existent as options. For either one of these options to become viable, things would have to grow so existential that there would suddenly be the overwhelming political will to do them. Since impeachment is a political act, you could go the 1868 route and simply impeach Trump for, being, well, Trump and rush it over to the Senate. We might even get witnesses for once.
But, remember, this is not something to hope for. Our political is so taunt, so dysfunctional, that for it to work again would mean A LOT OF PEOPLE WERE SICK AND DYING. And, if you throw The Gray Plague into the mix and the idea that a lot of the leaders who would help get rid of Trump would be, themselves incapacitated by WuFlu, well, I think you understand how bad things would be while we figured out how, exactly, to get rid of Trump. Throw in a limited nuclear exchange between the United States and the DPRK and things would get even more fucked up.
I don’t want this to happen. Yes, Trump has screamed at me and people like me for about four years. And, yes, he sees any willingness to compromise or work together as weakness to be exploited to the fullest for short term political gain. But I am an American, and if it seemed as though America, Columbia, was on her knees because of 3WW, then, I think everyone should just cool it and help the Trump Administration get us out of the situation as soon as possible.
Of course Trump would use any vacancies in the government caused by 3WW to consolidate power after it was over and he would also turn around and put everyone he didn’t like in an ICE camp, like he would do anyway in his second term, but lulz. YOLO.
To understand what’s going on right now with Trump and a looming pandemic on a political level, you have to go back to the origins of MAGA. Something about Obama’s second term freaked angry white Baby Boomers out. They realized, at last, that long-term demographics weren’t on their side and, as such, they grew full of rage. Probably what happened was the Russians noticed this envelopment and began a long-term plot to get Trump in as president. It was probably one of a number of geopolitical ratfucking ideas they had and it just happened to be the one that paid off on a rather massive level.
So, in a sense, Trump is very lucky. He’s a complete moron. A stooge. A pasty for the agenda of our biggest geopolitical foe. But, for the time being, he’s president. The MAGA base is now a death cult. They would rather we all die that admit that they were used in a crass political fashion for the needs of plutocrats and Russians.
This is the point where I say people across the political spectrum are not taking the possibility of a pandemic seriously. While Trump is obviously the most conspicuous and egregious, the center-Left has, the last few days, seen this crisis as an opportunity to score short term political points. You would, too, if a racist misogynist had scream at you at the top of his lungs for about four years.
One person the MAGA base isn’t thrilled with right now is Mike Pence. And Trump knows this, so, he’s hung Pence out to dry by making him the point man for the Trump Administration’s attempt to control a growing pandemic. Now, this is where things may get a little surreal. Given that we’re FINALLY beginning to test across the country, Pence’s attempts to message the base by saying everything is fine may grow rather dated even before their air tomorrow morning. If we wake up tomorrow morning to learn that 20 states have dozens of cases each, then, well, Pence isn’t going to look so great. (The exact chronology of how this might happen is up in the air, of course. But you get the picture.)
Now, the issue is, because Trump is a moron — not the political genius that access journalist Maggie Haberman would have us to believe — when things grow far, far FAR more dire than Trump could possibly imagine and his usual Stormy Daniel bullshit playbook is completely destroyed by, well, the reality that the MAGA base is experiencing, then the whole administration faces an existential problem. What happens then, is anyone’s guess. Or, to put it another way, when someone like Hugh Hewitt or Rick Santorum begin to act more like their 2012 selves again, then, well, Trump is in deep, deep trouble. Whatever those two guys said that would make me drop my jaw in shock would likely mean things have gotten very, very bad across the country. They’ve both invested so much in MAGA — and Trump as a person — for them to finally admit, again, that the sky is blue would likely be extremely surreal.
And it still may not happen. It’s possible that Trump will, again, escape and the Fourth Reich will grow in power and I’ll endup in a ICE death camp wit American Killing Fields as I’ve repeatedly predicted the last few years.
But if things really did get that bad — not that I want them to, mind you — Trump will either finally snap mentally in a rather spectacular fashion, or he will be seen through the lends of normal American politics and his power via the MAGA base will, at last, begin to wilt. A lot of Republicans who have felt a feudal fidelity to Trump will abruptly begin to distance themselves. Given how all-in they’ve been the last three years this event will be mindbogglingly surreal. It will be like returning to earth after three years in space.
And, really, it might even be just a moment in time. A few days until Trump collects his wits and uses the fact that a lot of people are dying as an excuse to consolidate power and we go back to the usual bullshit. My mind almost can’t even imagine how bad the pandemic would have to get for this to happen. Because the next, very, very, VERY late step in the game would be for Trump — if he’s not whipping his cock out and stroking it on TV by this point — to begin to pick people with some actual professionalism to speak for the administration, not political hacks. He would only do such a drastic thing if the usual rules of American politics came back so hard that he realized he wasn’t even going to be seen as a Republican Jimmy Carter. He would, at least, be seen for what he is — a real-life, deranged Chauncey Gardner.
But I really don’t want things to have to get that bad. I have come to accept that Trump is probably going to come after me — and people like me — in his second term and I’m going to die in an ICE camp killing field. If you think that’s just me having “Trump Derangement Disorder,” you can fuck off and eat shit you fucking MAGA fascist.
Oh boy. Trying to untie the logic behind Trump’s comment at his recent South Carolina Nuremberg rally is going to take some time. So, according to Trump at the news conference today, what he meant was the concern that the press was showing was the hoax, not the virus itself.
Ok.
So, in essence, he’s using the Zoolander argument MAGA is so fond of — he’s too bad a speaker, and too stupid, for anyone to accuse him of being a poorly informed racist misogynist hypocrite. But, really, it also admits that Trump wants it both ways.
He wants to scream at the top of his lungs to the base that the evil liberals are out to get him then within hours turn around and “respectfully” as the press not to hurt him by explaining how bad things are. It’s the same-old same-old scream at you to win power, then once power is attained scream at you for having Trump Derangement Disorder if you have the gall to scream back.
The reason why this usual bullshit begins to fall apart with COVID19 is, well, people’s lives are at stake. So the dynamic is significantly different. Or, to put a more fine point on it, old white people‘s lives are at stake. So, for once, MAGA may find themselves having to take Trump’s lies and bullshit both seriously and literally.
That’s a rather existential threat for Trump whose political power comes from lying and dog whistles. If he has to act like a traditional politician — and is judged by those metrics, his political goose is cooked.
I’ve told the MAGA people I know repeatedly over the last four years that they will dominate American politics for at least the next 20 years. On a macro level, we have about 20 years before the youngest of the Baby Boomers finally shuffle off this mortal coil. So, from a demographic level, we’re probably going to have a succession of Trumps with the occasional Mike Pompeo or Nikki Haley thrown in for good measure. That’s our future. MAGA’s version of warmed-over fascism is our future. It’s 100% or future. The end. Good night and good luck.
But.
The possibility of The Gray Plague is staring us in the face. It’s at least possible that given the systemic corruption of incompetence of the Trump Administration that if, say, that bastion of MAGA codgerland known as The Villages erupted with COVID19 cases and A LOT OF PEOPLE STARTED DYING that maybe Trump might not have the absolute lock on angry white Baby Boomers? I’m not suggesting that MAGA faces an existential threat — yet — but it might get the wind knocked out of it for at least one election cycle. Maybe. Remember, for all the talk about Watergate, Ford only BARELY LOST in 1976. So things would have to grow demonstrably catastrophic in the United States for Trump’s connection to the Baby Boomer volk to in any way degrade.
Put another way, if The Villages imploded, Trump would probably freak out in a rather spectator fashion. His absolute physiological need to win would strike the absolute likelihood that he might, at last, face some potential political consequences with the base. Given that MAGA is a massive cancer on America, for there to be any real chemo used against it, a lot of people would — very tragically — have to die for it to happen. I don’t want that and I’d much rather take my chances with Trump’s Fourth Reich.
The point I’m trying to make is, even if Trump faces a possible existential threat with The Gray Plague, the hate and fear of brown people and “takers” that he represents ain’t going anywhere and we’re all fucked.
Editor’s Note: I fucking hate the Trump Administration with a white hot rage. I want it destroyed, burned to the ground, lit on fire and buried. But I’m a man of peace, a man of ideas. I am also a former journalist, so I’m at least trying to give you an objective assessment of what’s going on. But, for the record: Fuck Trump. Fuck MAGA and Fuck You if you support either one of them.If you think that means I have “Trump Derangement Disorder,” please let me tell you in advance: eat shit.
by Shelt Garner @sheltgarner
I’m not an expert. I can’t predict the future. I don’t have reveled truth. But I can read. And I am sentient enough to notice some alarming things about what’s going on — or not going on — in the United States right now.
The United States Isn’t Testing For COVID19 The reason why you test, as I understand it, is you have a metric. You have some sense of who has it, who they’ve come in contact with. It’s your first line of defense when it comes to controlling the spread of something as contagious as COVID19. If you aren’t testing, then essentially “jungle rules” apply and the contagion goes completely unchecked. As such, the number of people who are infectious increases exponentially as do, ultimately, the people who will get sick and maybe even die. The United States have tested about 500 people while the South Koreans have tested something like 30,000. So, as of right now, they’re on opposite ends of the spectrum.
South Korea is a small nation that’s testing everyone. The United States is big nation doing, effectively, nothing. So, while I keep being reassured that while this is bad outbreak, it’s not “THE BIG ONE.” And, yet, while on paper that may not be true, if the United States’ isn’t testing anyone, wouldn’t it make sense that the only metric we will ultimately have is, well, people getting sick and dying?
And, really, how would we even know that was happening?
The Gray Plague: Stars’ End It seems to me that the only metric we will have is people dying, specifically elderly celebrities and political leaders. And, sad to say, the United States is pretty much run by old people at this point. So, if there WAS a massive culling of the American population of individuals 65 years of age and older, I suspect someone, somewhere — even MAGA — might notice this. There are about 47 million Americans who are considered “elderly” and, as you can see from this chart, the elderly face a significant increase in mortality because of COVID19
So, the mortality rate for people 60-80 starts at 3.6% and gets worse from there. There must be +50 million Americans who fit that bill. If you do absolutely nothing when it comes to testing for days after you know COVID19 is bouncing around the population, there’s going to come a point when The Gray Plague kicks in as a demonstrable fact. So, what might NOT have been “THE BIG ONE” may become it out of sheer criminal mismanagement on the part of the current criminally incompetent administration.
The WuFlop looks like this is about to happen.
The WuFlop Another metric we may be left with, given that we’re not testing anyone, is the WuFlop. It may have to be a few recorded instances of The WuFlop for America to take what’s going on seriously. So, in essence, the longer we DON’T have recorded instances of The WuFlop, the worst things are going to get because, well, lulz! It’s all a hoax by the evil liberals who hate MAGA and just don’t like Trump as a person or his “policies.” Well, I fucking hate Trump’s policies. Now what. When first Drudge and TMZ then the broadcast nets show clip after clip after clip of the WuFlop in the United States, maybe you need to re-evaluate your hot take on this situation, you racist MAGA fascist piece of shit.
Anyway, the point is, the longer we don’t have any metrics, the worst things are going to be. It could become rather nightmarish. So, in a sense, you could say the best case scenario would be either a major celebrity or political figure gets sick form COVID19 this weekend or someone does the WuFlop about the same time. If it’s Friday and we still have no metrics of how big the infection is and we start testing, we may realize EVERYONE has been exposed and, really, there’s nothing we can do but just let it run its course.
Not that there won’t be a panic, but in the end, everyone will be so sick that there won’t be anything the medical profession can do but just watch people get sick and maybe die. But, you know, like I said, I can’t predict the future. So, it’s possible that while this is going to be “bad” it won’t be THE BIG ONE. If isn’t, I’ll be quite pleased. I have a novel I’m developing and I really want to start working on the first draft.
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.
Other than working overtime to re-assure the stock market, the Trump Administration is doing effectively nothing about COVID19. This is because of the metrics they are using.
Keep The Markets Happy All Trump wants is the “German Industrialists” to be happy so they will continue to give him a pass on policy. So, in his mind, “it’s just the flu.” As such, given a lot of people die from the flu each year –as Twitter liberals keep telling me — as long as he has an effective messaging strategy and plutocrats make a lot of money then lulz. A million people could die unnecessarily and, well, that’s not really that much more than the flu, right? Trump has such a lack of the ability to comprehend any form of empathy or compassion that as long as the economy is humming and he and his shithead plutocrats are making money, the poors can fuck off.
Win Re-Election This goes hand-in-hand with the above. He’s extremely paranoid about the evil liberals with their evil fact-base science “weaponizing” reality to “bring him down” that he, again, would rather withhold valuable information from the public in the hopes that, in effect, people will forget about it. It’s just the flu. All your old relatives died because of “the flu” so shut up and vote for me, you mouth breathing knuckle dragger. In other words, as long as the base believes it’s “just the flu” and remain locked in, then everyone else can fuck off and drop dead. Power for power’s sake. Greed for greed’s sake. Cruelty for cruelty’s sake.
Consolidate Power And, really, if you wanted to kind of dystopian, you could say there are people like Stephen Miller who simply see the prospect of The Gray Plague as a means to an end — consolidation of power far quicker than they could ever imagine otherwise.
There are two ways to look at these metrics. One, Trump’s going to yet again evade any political consequence because the base is so afraid of the browning of America that Trump can send the whole country over the precipice and, well, lulz. And, I guess, there’s a decent chance that might work out. A lot of people — especially older people — may get sick and die, but if you can stay on message that “it’s just the flu” then lulz, no political harm no foul. It will be a more deadly edition to a string of Trump self-owns that have happened over the years. This is why Mike Pence is in control of the American response to WuFlu now. He’s a complete suck up who wants to stay on the ticket in 2020. He has every reason to prevaricate as need be to have people simply shrug this off and go back to raising their kids, paying their mortgage and, most of all, voting Trump 2020 in the fall.
And, yet, there’s another option. What if instead of simply “burning itself out,” COVID19 gets really, really, REALLY bad in the States to such an extent that the usual Trump ratfucking at last collapses? Now, Trump would see this initially as a win because he will have an excuse to get rid of Pence and maybe name Don Jr. his veep. But there are some additional problems his poor addled brain can’t comprehend because, despite Maggie Haberman’s cooing about this all the time, Trump isn’t a political genius, he’s just historically lucky.
In other words, Trump may finally meet his political match if, well, America is brought to its knees on a level not seen since the Civil War. A number of things might happen if Trump strictly follows the metrics I laid out above. The 20% of the infected who get REALLY REALLY REALLY sick may reach such a high percentage of the American population that, well, the economy locks up because no one is well enough to go to work. The health care system locks up and collapses. Even then, however, Trump would probably blame liberals, or MS-13 or whatever the fuck that idiot can come up with. And the base, thinking Trump is Jesus H. Christ himself who is the only person who can stop the general historic tend towards a minority-majority America, will abide by it.
But there are two things Trump can’t control — the WuFlop and The Gray Plague.
The WuFlop This is the rather dramatic — and eerie — event when someone who seems healthy abruptly faceplants and, sometimes, begins to writhe uncontrollably on the ground like they have a xenomorph in them about to pop out. It wouldn’t take too many recorded instances of this happening around the United States in the next two weeks for, well, there to be some political consequences for House Trump. Each time I’ve seen the WuFlop videos on Twitter, I’ve gasped. Initially, of course, these videos wouldn’t be show on TV. But if enough WuFlops happened, there would come a point where they WOULD show up on TV. That would cause a panic and we would, at last, realize that Trump has not clothes and he’s lead us all into a very dark situation with no ready solution in the near term.
The Gray Plague If thing get as bad as I fear, then a whole lot of elderly people are going to die. A whole lot. A huge amount. A shocking amount. And a lot of powerful people are elderly. Of course, Trump would at first see this as a win because if a dozen powerful elderly center-Left people died rather abruptly, then he gets to consolidate power faster. But, “death be not proud,” so a lot of elderly center-RIGHT figures could die, too. If things got bad enough, Trump, at last, might have finally met his match because it will rather abruptly dawn on everyone that it was directly because of his obsession with owning libs that an obscene number of Americans died for no damn reason.
Before you get too excited, we have to think about Trump’s reaction to this. He’s probably going to snap. He’s probably going to, in a panic, shut down the Internet, order passenger planes be shot out of the sky, suspend the Constitution and declare martial law. The question, of course, is what the reaction would be, in practical terms to all of this. I find it doubtful that the US Military would follow any of these crazy orders, but the MAGA base WOULD likely begin to hunt down and murder “libtards”– like ME! — like members of a Cultural Revolution group. I know that sounds rather panicky and hysterical — maybe I have Trump Derailment Disorder — but the we won’t know until that time comes, now will we? We’ve never had a POTUS go bonkers and so, I guess, anything is possible.
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