REVIEW – Star Trek Discovery: Season 3

So: As I was saying, the main problem with Star Trek Discovery in its first two seasons is that they made the decision to have its main character be intimately involved in the history of at least one Original Series character despite the fact that she was never mentioned before, and therefore Discovery had to be placed in the Original Series period when the stories, the technology and the overall presentation went out of their way to not look anything like TOS, even compared to the pre-Kirk series Enterprise. Case in point: In the Enterprise story arc that occurred in the Mirror Universe, they at least had some reference to the sexy uniforms the cast wore in the original “Mirror, Mirror” episode. Whereas when Discovery entered the Mirror Universe, the Terran Empire uniforms were all Italian Fascist chic, and the overall look resembled the Lady Gaga video for “Alejandro.”

Now while Season 3 did end up going back to that, namely to work out the fact that Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) is now both a dimensional and time paradox, moving the series far into the future (far past even Star Trek Picard) is the best thing that ever happened to Discovery, because now they don’t even have to pretend to care about continuity. The old standards no longer apply. Which was very much the theme of this season.

First, Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) appeared a year before Discovery in the future timeline and had all that time to get used to the new environment and life with smuggler-with-a-heart of-gold Cleveland Booker (David Ajala), who taught her that the Federation had mostly collapsed after an event called “the Burn” in which most of the dilithium in the galaxy exploded, along with the ships that were using it. So even after Discovery shows up and she finds them, their main quest is to find what’s left of the Federation and help ‘get the band back together’, which I’m sure is going to be the continuing premise of Season 4.

In the midst of this, the crew finds the 32nd Century Starfleet Command, led by Admiral Vance (veteran actor Oded Fehr) and discovers not only that the refugee Romulans fully reunited with the Vulcans (changing the homeworld’s name to Ni’Var) but the Andorians after splitting off from the Feds ended up joining the Orions to create “the Emerald Chain”, which was set up as the main antagonist of the season. This was one of the better decisions they made, because the Orions always had the potential to be the capitalist/pirate/crime syndicate villains that Gene Roddenberry set up the Ferengi to be despite how embarrassing they were. Unfortunately while Chain leader Osyraa (Janet Kidder) and her lieutenant Zarek had both malice and style, they were apparently too ruthless to be left alive.

But the dilithium shortage created a situation where the Federation’s mode of civilization is now more the exception than the rule in a frontier-like environment, and Discovery’s spore drive not only allows it to bypass the limitations of other ships but makes it indispensable to the Federation and the quest to discover the source of the Burn. The Burn really was a great device to change the nature of the whole Star Trek setting. Unfortunately, the revelation that it boiled down to a child’s reaction to his mother’s death made the whole thing sink like a lead balloon.

Yes, it did give the actors involved some great emotional scenes, but the fact that this event was what led to the destruction of galactic civilization seems more than a bit anti-climax. Although the Su’Kal storyline did end up creating Discovery’s greatest special effect, in which the holo-program Su’Kal is living in made Saru appear as a human, so that for the first time Doug Jones got to play his character without makeup, and he actually looked WEIRDER.

And then they just sort of wrapped the whole thing up a bit too neatly. Osyraa, the main rival to the Federation government, was taken out, and in passing they said the Emerald Chain was breaking up. And with Saru helping take care of Su’Kal, Vance gave command of the Discovery to Burnham. And I’m not sure how I feel about that. Partially because it sort of confirms Burnham’s Mary-Sue status in Star Trek, but also because, contrary to the opinion that they’d been setting up this ascension from the beginning, you could make a good case, especially in Season 3, that the show was setting up the premise that maybe Michael WASN’T cut out to be a ship’s captain. Remember that the series basically started with an act of gross insubordination against the original Captain Georgiou. And in both Seasons 2 and 3, Saru experienced substantial growth as a personality and proved himself to be just as much captain material as Christopher Pike, whom Starfleet insisted on making the interim captain during Season 2 despite not having served on Discovery. Thus when the crew ended up in the 32nd Century, they unofficially decided to make Saru their full commander, a decision confirmed by the contemporary Starfleet. Meanwhile Burnham had spent all that time before the reunion traveling with Book as a rogue trader and getting used to the idea of a life outside the Starfleet command structure. And as Saru’s executive officer, she was obliged to direct an away team mission while Saru was at Starfleet, and while she did an excellent job, in a later episode Burnham went against Saru’s direct orders, and when Saru found out about this and consulted her friend Tilly, she reluctantly counseled him to go by the book rather than let Burnham off. And the interesting thing is that Saru finally decided to remove Burnham from the XO position and install Tilly there, because he saw that there is no point in being in command if you have no regard for the command structure, and Tilly realized that better than Burnham did. So in flipping around at the end and removing Tilly and Saru from Michael’s path, I suppose Discovery has confounded audience expectations, but not necessarily in a good way.

Another example of the “I’m not sure where they’re going with this” is Discovery‘s continued attempts at diversity. They had previously introduced Dr. Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp) and his husband Dr. Hugh Culber (Wilson Cruz) only to kill Culber in Season 1. They came up with an ingenious method (using Stamets’ connection to the spore network) to resurrect Culber in Season 2, but after that Culber broke off the relationship since he no longer felt like he was in love with Stamets – he had the memory of their relationship, but not the experience of it. I thought this was an interesting angle to take with the character – if you die, is there a soul outside the body that just comes back if the body is restored, or is the person a purely material thing, and therefore Hugh is really not the same individual? This is a question that poses potentially disturbing answers (whether you’re an atheist or believer) and the show didn’t really get into it after Hugh volunteered to go with Paul into the future. They only touched on it a couple times this season, namely near the end when Hugh volunteered to go down to Su’Kal’s planet to help bring him out of his isolation. The relationship also ties into the new character introduced in Season 3, the 32nd Century Terran prodigy Adira Tal (Blu del Barrio), who was promoted as the first non-binary character in Star Trek. From a SF standpoint, Adira is more interesting in being a Human who is somehow able to host a Trill (apparently they improved the transplant technology after all those years) and a Trill who has a past life that is still separate and conscious – her boyfriend Gray (Ian Alexander) who had begged Adira to take the symbiont when he was dying. The two characters seem to be something of a primer for the audience in how to deal with trans people in their lives – especially since Adira is first introduced to Burnham as female, but then is put in Stamets’ engineering team and ends up confessing that they prefer to be addressed as “they.” (Apparently this paralleled del Barrio’s own decision to come out in real life.) The fact that Adira’s main connection to the crew ends up being the cis gay couple of Stamets and Culber also seemed deliberate. And Gray Tal’s continued individual existence is finally revealed when both Hugh and Adira end up on Su’Kal’s planet and Hugh can finally see Gray through the holo-program. And the fact that Gray no longer has a physical presence once the program is terminated leads Hugh to promise Gray that he will help find a way that he can be “seen” – another message to the audience that seems deliberate. Now, these moments are part of the great emotional scenes I referred to earlier, but they’re not exactly being subtle with the meta-text. Which just gets to how I have the same problem with Discovery that I have with Star Trek: Picard – I like the characters, and I really like the actors, but the writing falls down.

The main reason I bring most of this up is that the new parental relationship Paul and Hugh have to Adira/Gray led to an actual bit of tension between protagonists, when Burnham rescued Stamets from the Emerald Chain and he told her they had to get Culber and Saru off Su’Kal’s planet, and Burnham told her that would lead the chain to a huge dilithium source that was also the origin of the Burn. When she told Stamets that Adira had gone to the planet to give the two men radiation drugs to keep them alive, Stamets completely lost it, and Burnham had to subdue him then launch him in a pod towards Starfleet Command Center so that Osyraa couldn’t use the Discovery to reach Su’Kal’s planet. And while that case of Burnham’s ruthless on-the-fly decision making was actually the right move (and probably contributed to Vance’s decision to give her the ship), they’re making it pretty clear that Stamets hasn’t forgiven Burnham for it, and that may cause her problems going forward.

That and the rebuilding-the-Federation premise is what gives me hope for Season 4, but I’m still ambivalent. I’d said in my review of Season 1, “Discovery at least takes chances, and when it goes wrong, it isn’t because they failed in execution, it’s because they went forthrightly in a certain direction that just turned out to be the wrong one.” This show does take chances, but that doesn’t mean they always work out. This is part of why the show attracts so much flak, and given that it’s hardly the only Star Trek show to have bad moments and false steps, it’s hard to say how much of the hate is a politically incorrect fandom and how much is the ambivalent product.

It doesn’t help that the show’s semi-official nickname seems to be “DISCO.” Which might not even be the worst choice. If you were to apply the three-letter abbreviation format that these other shows have, so that the original series is “TOS”, Voyager is “VOY” and Enterprise is “ENT”, that would make Discovery “DIS.” Or “STD.”

Even so, Season 3 is certainly the best Discovery so far, again because the premise of kicking the cast out of standard Trek’s timeline eliminates the conflict they created for themselves in being so much unlike other Trek material. I’ve seen at least one YouTube video making a detailed case that the “Temporal Wars” referred to in both this series and Enterprise demonstrate that both series are in their own timeline that, like JJ Abrams’ Trek, ultimately has nothing to do with the Prime universe. This does not seem to be the canon position, but it helps me feel better about Discovery. At least with Season 3, there’s a better chance the show will be appreciated on its own terms.

REVIEW: Star Trek Discovery – Season Two

Star Trek: Discovery came back for Season Three, which just ended. But before dealing with that, I realized I never did a review of Season Two. Which is relevant because it not only sets up Season Three, but also an even more explicitly retro-Trek project with pre-logical Spock, Captain Pike and “Number One” in the soon-to-be-produced series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. The fact that Strange New Worlds is a more logical version of retro-Trek than Discovery is one of the main lessons I took from watching Discovery Season 2.

Discovery Season 2 begins with the cliffhanger scene from the end of Season 1, where the ship came face-to-face with the USS Enterprise under Captain Pike. At this point, of course, Spock is already an officer on that ship, and Discovery established that Commander Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) is Spock’s adoptive sister. The first few episodes of Season 2 tease dramatic reunions – Burnham with Spock, Burnham with Tyler, the Discovery with the Enterprise and Stamets with Culber – that do not immediately occur. As it turns out, the Enterprise’s Captain Pike is assigned to the Discovery while his ship is undergoing repairs and Discovery is still waiting for an official captain assignment, and Pike has to tell Burnham that Spock has gone missing. This sets off an investigation by Burnham that reveals her own childhood trauma and rift with Spock, not to mention the old Trek plot device of time travel.

And as we know, time travel becomes the primary focus of the season arc, as Pike’s mission ends up working backwards to learn why a “Red Angel” is appearing at pivotal events.

As good as individual elements of the Season 2 storyline were, the whole thing just brought the problems demonstrated by Discovery Season 1 to a head. I had already mentioned one of them. Rather than create new Vulcan characters as producers did with Enterprise, producers linked Burnham’s background to none other than Sarek and Spock, which meant that comparisons with the original material were inevitable, especially in Season 2 as they made Captain Pike a central character while somehow de-emphasizing Spock.

Going back to the old characters actually worked for the Abrams movies, because the cast was able to make characters that stood on their own as people in a parallel universe but were clearly intended to evoke the concepts of the originals. This was especially true with Chris Pine, who pulled off the amazing trick of creating a character who is quintessentially James T. Kirk without being a bad William Shatner impression. Because let’s face it, no one can do a bad William Shatner impression like Bill Shatner.

The producers of Discovery weren’t as lucky. I already said I didn’t find James Frain convincing as Sarek, even though I think he’s a good actor. However this season, I was pretty impressed by Mia Kershner as his wife Amanda. The major find of this season, though, was Anson Mount as Christopher Pike. That character had really appeared only in the pilot episode “The Cage”, played by Jeffrey Hunter. (They presented a heavily made up Sean Kenney to play the maimed Pike in ‘The Menagerie’, the flashback episode made out of The Cage, to help cover the fact that Hunter refused to reprise the role after deciding not to continue after the pilot.) I liked Hunter’s version of the character. He seemed to have an edge. In the scene where he’s talking to the ship’s doctor, one gets the impression he’s a nearly burned-out military vet who has seen some shit. And in the scenes where the Talosians are trying to tempt him, he seems like he would be just as happy to retire to a ranch and raise horses.

Like most of the Discovery actors playing Original Series people, Anson Mount doesn’t really come across like the original actor, other than being the leading-man type. But in this case it works. Mount is sort of like Chris Evans in the Captain America movies: He doesn’t even try to play anything other than the True-Blue Hero, and he doesn’t need to, cause he’s so good at it. And the fact that he is obliged to see his horrible future but chooses to suffer it anyway in order to save the timeline gives Pike a sort of tragic perspective that Hunter’s character didn’t have.

As for Spock, Ethan Peck is a good actor and a pleasant presence, but he is just as much not-Leonard Nimoy as Mount is not-Jeffrey Hunter, and in this case it doesn’t work as well, because Nimoy had so much more time to put his stamp on the character, and Peck doesn’t embody Spock nearly as well as Zachary Quinto. I’m also not quite sure why, but Discovery Season 2 made the decision to make Spock more of a device than a pivotal figure, as opposed to Pike or Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) or even Tyler. It doesn’t help that he’s very not “Spock-like” in this story arc, even if there is a reason for that.

This contrast between what we have now and what the characters were is of course going to be a factor when Strange New Worlds comes out, but there is at least an attempt to emulate old-school Trek with the Enterprise crew (and uniforms) that deliberately sets them apart from the design of Discovery, and that only serves to confirm the fundamental dilemma of calling this a Star Trek show. It’s not really much of a dilemma if you are one of those old-school, politically incorrect types that never did like Discovery, but it’s a problem if you actually do like it.

And a lot of what it comes down to is this:

You couldn’t have had a character like Michael Burnham as a star character in the time of original Trek. And that’s not because the producers were lacking for “diversity” or political correctness: The progressive tone of the original series is overstated, but it was real. The pilot episode did have Majel Barrett as the executive officer. The show did give us Uhuru and Sulu. The original series cast several non-white actors, including the great William Marshall as Dr. Richard Daystrom, one of the pivotal figures in Federation science. And of course, the breakout star was a not-leading-man casting, Jewish actor playing a half-human alien.

The problem rather, was that “political correctness” worked the other way back then, and the network executives fought Gene Roddenberry and his crew over a lot of their barrier-breaking ideas. They rejected the pilot episode character (Number One) played by Barrett and barely embraced Spock, so that Barrett got demoted to playing Dr. McCoy’s nurse and Spock ended up being both Science Officer and XO. I have no doubt that Roddenberry, DC Fontana or one of the other writers could have created a character like Burnham, but given what Nichelle Nichols has described in the stress of playing Uhuru, who was only a support character, it’s pretty much impossible that networks in that time would have cast a black woman as the star of an action show.

Then there’s the fact that unlike Enterprise, Discovery never even tried to establish internal continuity with pre-Kirk Trek, with sick bay tech more advanced than Dr. McCoy’s, and a ‘spore drive’ that was probably not imaginable in the ’60s. To say nothing of the fact that they changed the Klingon makeup yet again.

Now, maybe with modern attitudes we can show the characters that original Trek clearly indicated could exist elsewhere in the Federation (just as we can now create aliens like Saru now that Trek has an effects budget above four digits), but we’re still left with the point that for an unfortunate real-world reason, Michael Burnham could not have been a pivotal figure in the history of the Enterprise and the Federation before Kirk, and therefore in order to preserve the Federation from Control (and to preserve what’s left of continuity), the best way Tyler, Spock and Pike can honor her life is to pretend she never existed and never speak of her again.

The main attraction of Discovery – ‘what if we could do old-school Trek, but with diverse characters and addressing situations we couldn’t have mentioned in the 1960s?’ – was also the show’s main weakness, because there’s a whole bunch of reasons why the Original Series didn’t have these elements, and pretending that you can take a modern premise and put it in a ‘historical’ setting doesn’t work, for the same reason it wouldn’t work if you did a remake of The Scarlet Pimpernel scripted by David Mamet and directed by Quentin Tarantino. (Though I would pay good money to watch the result.)

It basically goes back to the point I’d made in my other two reviews: In going back to established material, you are inevitably dealing with continuity issues, and it defeats the purpose of saying that Discovery is in the Original Series period when it goes out of its way to NOT feel like it. Eventually the show painted itself into a corner where the only way to resolve the setting issue was to remove Discovery from the timeline altogether – which is just what they did.

First Impressions

Thursday I saw this clip from Ultra-Radical Centrists on Facebook, detailing the last place we’d seen Jen Psaki, under the Obama Administration. “Time for a flash back to this classic performance of hers from 6 years ago where she told with a straight face that it was a ‘long standing policy’ for the US to not promote coups in Latin American nations.”

Simply doing a standard press briefing on January 20 seems to have pacified the Washington press corps, but that’s just because we’ve moved from a pack of surly liars who want to gaslight you over them stealing the silverware to a group of professional liars who know how to keep the story straight.

Yes, going back to normal is an improvement, but only the first step. After all, “normal” is how we got Trump.

—

It seems as though Viceroy Trump’s shocktroopers are starting to have second thoughts.

“Proud Boys are ditching Trump hours after he left the White House for good, calling him a ‘shill’ and ‘extraordinarily weak'”

“However, as Trump left office, some Proud Boys were disappointed that he didn’t put up more of a fight to stay in power, and that he later condemned the violence that ensued during the Capitol siege, which led to five deaths.”Some members called Trump a “shill” and “extraordinarily weak,” and have since urged others not to attend any more Trump events or even those from the Republican party, The Times reported.

“Members are angered that Trump didn’t help the Proud Boys arrested for their involvement in the January 6 siege.”

“Q Anon followers are giving up on their conspiracy theory after Biden’s inauguration: ‘Is anyone still holding the line?'”

“One hour after President Joe Biden was inaugurated in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, QAnon conspiracy-theory chat rooms had an overwhelming — albeit familiar — sense of hopelessness.

“What are we waiting for now?” one comment in a QAnon Telegram channel said. “Is anyone still holding the line?” said another.

“So, was Q just one big lie and psyop that I foolishly followed and believed for over 3 years?” another user said.”

“Wednesday was the final chance at redemption for QAnon, a baseless far-right conspiracy theory alleging that former President Donald Trump was fighting a “deep state” cabal of pedophiles and human traffickers.

“Many believers of QAnon had anticipated that Biden would be arrested at his inauguration, or that Trump would do something, anything at all, to prevent his successor from taking office.

“But in the end, Trump said goodbye, danced to the ‘YMCA,’ and flew to Florida, and Biden became president.”

…You mean he LIED to me???

—

The Beltway media is telling us that the two parties in the Senate are in a standoff over the use of the filibuster. Actually not just the filibuster, but the whole ‘organizing package’ of the current Congress that determines who controls committees. “The longer the standoff over the organizing package persists, the weirder the Senate will become. New senators have not been added to committees and the ratios have not changed, leaving the GOP in the majority on some panels.” This is all done, of course, for the sake of Mitch “the Bitch” McConnell and his attempts to retain effective personal veto power on all activity despite no longer being Senate Majority Leader. “Schumer may be able to satisfy McConnell with something less than a written commitment, perhaps a speech on the Senate floor or a verbal acknowledgement that his preference is not to invoke the nuclear option. But even some Republicans are skeptical that Democrats will give up their leverage so easily and simply trust that Republicans will work with them on legislation. McConnell’s “reasoning is let’s do it now while we’re all in this management mode as opposed to under fire when there’s a burning issue,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.). “I’m skeptical of the outcome. I think Mitch’s effort is noble but I just don’t think it ends there.”

This of course is happening at the same time that the Senate has to take Viceroy Trump’s second impeachment trial, and even after he basically sent a mob to kill them, hardly anyone in the Republican caucus is definitely saying they’d vote to convict. Senator Rand Paul (BR.-Kentucky) told Fox’s Laura Ingraham that “a third of Republicans will leave the party” if it goes along with impeachment. Well, again: sounds like a You problem.

Look, Democrats have two imperatives before this Biden Administration even gets off the ground: One is to stop the Republicans from filibustering every damn thing on the Senate floor or else it will take 60 Senators to get anything done, meaning, nothing will get done. The other is to convict Trump for inciting an insurrection, because even if he’s only the President of Mar-a-Lago now, a conviction would mean that there would be a simple majority vote on banning him from federal office again, and even if Rand Paul is inclined to forgive his Master for sending his mob to trash the chamber, I don’t think the fellow Senator from Kentucky will, especially since Trump, combining the worst traits of Archie Bunker and Inspector Clouseau, single-handedly killed the Republicans’ chances in Georgia, and with those losses, took McConnell’s control of the Senate. Which is why he has to fight for what he can now.

Democrats are probably not going to outright kill the filibuster (otherwise that would kill the influence of West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, the last conservative Southern Democrat, and they need all the Senators they have), but they at least need to maintain the option. Currently neither party has reason to back down, but someone has to. And again, the key factor for Republicans is that if they got what they want in both floor assignments and impeachment, Trump would go free to run again, and the more foresighted Republicans (such as they are) realize that would be as much a problem for them as anybody. At the same time, convicting Trump is a short-term priority for Democrats compared to the ability to organize the floor, since they know (from experience with Obama) that Mitch and the Republicans will try to obstruct every single thing they want to do and then turn around and say that Democrats can’t get anything done and use that as the reason to campaign for more seats.

Democrats have to use the Republicans’ position against them. They have to be willing to let Trump’s conviction go to fight for the Senate, because that’s what they actually HAVE now, and it’s only McConell who is forcing the issue. McConnell would (probably) like to convict Trump but he can’t press his caucus and Democrats still need at least 17 defectors from the Party of Trump. But after their second opportunity to hold Trump accountable, if they smile for the reporters and say he’s “learned his lesson” again, that’s a liability for anyone in 2022. And if they want to keep their committee assignments, Democrats have to go around them and bring everything to a floor vote, which Chuck Schumer can do now.

Democrats have to make it clear that they can bear the consequences of not going along with the Republicans – not having committees and not having a Trump conviction – better than the Republicans can. Trump is now just as much of a problem to them. And the committee system is a convenience for the body, and if Republicans want to make it inconvenient for the majority, Democrats will have to govern without it.

In short, if Chuck Schumer is capable of realizing it (which I doubt), Democrats really have Republicans over a barrel and he ought to just make them work with him and not the other way around. If Republicans don’t like it? Tough. It was Mitch McConnell who said “Elections have consequences.” It is the Republican Party that acts as though 51 percent of the vote (in their case less) earns 100 percent of the power. And however many conservatives pretend to Social Darwinism, there isn’t even a point in having elections if we cannot enforce consequences for peddling stupidity.

The Final Fisking

I’m not really in the mood to give Viceroy Trump a political obituary the way I did with Barack Obama. For one thing, The Trump Organization will not actually be dead until it is staked in the coffin, has its head chopped off, then has the coffin blasted to bits in a sealed room so that the ashes cannot escape, at which point the ashes will be collected and shot into the sun. Trump is the anti-Tom Joad. Whenever someone is being a belligerent idiot, he’ll be there. Whenever some businessman is driving a creditor into bankruptcy cause he won’t pay his bills, he’ll be there. Whenever you see a cop beating a guy, he’ll be that cop. Trump is immortal.

But that hasn’t stopped some columnists from doing the same, for example at National Review, whose new motto seems to be “We’re not PRO-Trump, we’ve just got a funny way of showing it.” And as part of the literate Right’s desire to play Schrodinger’s Conservative and have their “benefits” of Trumpism and their “deep concern” too, they’ve given a piece to David L. Bahnsen, who “runs a private-wealth-management firm and is a National Review Institute trustee.” This piece, “A Final Assessment of the Trump Presidency, and the Path Forward” is supposed to be a warts-and-all review of Trump’s presidency, but in its typical desire to rationalize conservative Trump support, reveals a cluelessness surpassing Julianne Hough wearing blackface to the Halloween party. And so I have decided to give this particular column a fisking in order to help sum up the effects of The Trump Organization on our country, and on Republican politics in particular.

Remember, “fisking” is a term that first referred to the point-by-point rebuttal of leftist journalist Robert Fisk, back in the Bush Administration days when some people on the Right still had enough brains to form a philosophy other than “The Trump is my shepherd; I shall not want.” Fisking is not to be confused with “fisting”, even if the intent and result are similar.

In hindsight, I wish I had published this article before the events of January 6 at the Capitol building.

I’ll bet.

My goal in this piece has been important to me for a long time — an objective, thoughtful, and fair assessment of the Trump presidency, complete with some suggestions for the path forward in political life after Trump. The ambitions of this article are not changed by the riots, and in fact some conclusions are reinforced by them. However, the already high volume at which this particular conversation takes place in all circles is now even higher, and when everything is this loud, it seems that nothing gets heard at all. I have never written an article before where I felt such a burden to manage the volume to the end of the takeaways, even if not everything will be found agreeable by all.

That strange and awkward preface is not something I can ever imagine writing for the typical articles I author in the fields of economics, culture, and social thought.

Well, that should tell you your chances of success in this endeavor.

…my intent in this article: to assess the overall presidency of Donald Trump, and to do so with no need for vindication, no axe to grind, and a truly open and humble disposition. The advantage (and burden) of such a piece versus all of the various ad hoc events, policies, tweets, and decisions over the years is that I am now trying to “pull it all together.” There is some finality in this, and that means final conclusions will offend or bother some readers. I hope the offense or bother this piece produces for supporters and critics of the president will be minimal and even pre-forgiven. I write on this subject because I want a path forward.

I do not worry about the offense or bother this piece may or may not cause in the far Left — in those whose efforts at critiquing Donald Trump have been unhinged, unfair, and completely counterproductive. The undeserved martyr-like treatment given to Trump by many of his supporters is mostly the by-product of his treatment by the media, which makes no sense to me. I don’t suggest they did not have material available to them, because they had it in abundance. I am suggesting that rather than critiquing the president with the obvious things right in front of them, a huge portion of the country chose to chase absurd conspiracy theories, wild insinuations of Hitlerian tendencies, and often overt lies that served to create insurmountable distrust when there were truthful criticisms to launch. The “CNN camp” has made the role of presidential critics such as myself almost impossible, lumping us in with the unhinged camp. For purposes of my piece, I ask you to fairly and rightly separate my efforts from that camp, because they do not belong there.

Well, let me go into some detail. First, Mr. Bahnsen, you should not stress over whether your opinions cause any offense on the Left, because they’re going to find something to be offended about no matter what you say. Secondly, it is superficial to say that attacks on Trump are all exaggerated or “Hitlerian.” I personally find such comparisons to be a big insult. To Hitler. After all, Hitler actually volunteered for the army, and he led an economic recovery for more than three years before starting a major catastrophe that killed everybody. The thesis of my response is that your very equivocation betrays the problem with presenting an ‘even-handed’ treatment of the subject Mr. Trump. If there are indeed good things about the Trump time in office from a neutral or right-wing perspective, the fact that both the praise and hate for Trump are exaggerated out of proportion to results (I differ as to how exaggerated these opinions are) indicates the problem for the critic who presents himself as even-handed. Not just in that the Left will not hear anything good you have to say about Trump, but more that the Right will not hear any criticism of their Leader. My suspicion borne out by the last four years of observation is that the Right will be a tougher sell for your “path forward”, for that reason.

Many who had the “Never Trump” label ascribed to them sacrificed needed credibility, either early on or, for others, later into the presidency, for a willingness to sacrifice previously held beliefs if it meant being aligned with the president.

There’s a difference between “sacrificing” previously held beliefs just because they’re associated with an individual and changing one’s beliefs because you’ve learned something with experience and perspective. By the same token, if one’s experience causes a person to align against a given individual, that doesn’t necessarily disqualify their opinion just because you want to defend that subject.

And the so-called “Always Trump” camp never found a way to generally support an agenda without an unhealthy, often sycophantic, loyalty to the president. The bipolarity of these two positions has taken over the Right these last four years, leaving some who have genuinely believed that there was not just room for, but the necessity for, a more nuanced position in exile.

Yes, except that bi-polarity implies there are two positions. Those “Never Trumpers” who committed heresy against Our President have in effect excommunicated themselves from the Right, no matter their positions on taxes or abortion or such. Their main opportunities for media exposure are with the Washington Post media, or MSNBC, or one of those other mainstream outlets, which means they will be shut off by Republican listeners just as surely as The Liberal Media deplatforms Republicans and cancels their book contracts. It is not the Never Trumpers who were preventing “a more nuanced position in exile” – they were trying to create it. They could not, because the “Always Trump” position is now dominant in the Republican Party and conservative movement, and nuance is the enemy to them.

I want to say something to the president’s most ardent supporters, the group I fear will be offended by many of the conclusions of this piece. Whether you come out of this reading convinced of this or not, I really do, from the bottom of my heart, understand. I understand the frustrations you feel, the fear you have for what is happening in our country and our culture. I understand the desire for there to be someone who you feel is pushing back or fighting. It makes perfect sense to me why you find the media contemptible, and why you see someone such as President Trump who so often fights with the media as your friend, and maybe even your protector.

Ah, so a riot is the language of the unheard. I get it.

The very heartfelt and rational critiques I offer herein about Donald Trump are not because I disagree with you about those problems; they are because I disagree with you about Trump as the solution.I hope you will find my arguments for such persuasive. …Those who are the most significant critics of Trump on the Right have too often failed to strive for any level of empathy for those identifying as Trump supporters when significant empathy is warranted and even required.

Guy, their favorite slogan was “Fuck Your Feelings.” I wasn’t aware that was a cry for empathy.

And to the extent that I agree with your central point, sir, it’s that the Trump fan club that took over conservatism (to the extent it blends into the Tea Party) had some real points about business-as-usual government (mainly from Democrats but also establishment Republicans) and the fact that they were completely wrong about the solution doesn’t change the fact that there are real issues with pre-Trump government. More’s the pity, because association with Trump means first and foremost that such supposedly conscientious people really cared more about the negative impulses they got to indulge in Trump’s cult of personality. More to the point, the fact that Trump IS identified as “the solution” because he has absorbed the Right and will brook no debate makes it that much less likely that real reform can happen outside “the swamp.” He hasn’t drained it, he has made it stronger, because he has made it look preferable to the alleged solution.

The Good

There are some things that have to be said about the Trump presidency in a “final hour assessment” that are unambiguously good. And I will start with the single greatest achievement of the entire Trump era: He kept Hillary Clinton from ever being our president. For all the other good and bad, I have absolutely no problem rooting this piece in the simple observation that President Donald Trump meant there was no President Hillary Clinton, and that is an unalloyed good. I haven’t compromised a single bit around the case that Hillary Clinton would have been an unfathomable disaster for our country. Her defeat is something I will celebrate forever, regardless of who it was who defeated her. I do not share the belief of some of my friends that in 2016 “only Trump could have beaten her.” What we know is that President Trump did defeat her, to the surprise of many — including myself. This remains the hallmark achievement of the Trump era.

Ehh, almost, but not quite.

The fact that Hillary can inspire (and deserve) such hatred even now, and that both Biden and Obama won clear victories when the Electoral College slipped out of her fingers, indicates in retrospect that almost anybody could have beaten her, and my personal conspiracy theory is that Donnie’s old buddy Bill put Trump up to running against Hillary Clinton as the ultimate wrestling heel as part of the effort to tar the Republican Party for good. They just forgot that people like wrestling heels more than Hillary. And I personally agree with the Clinton camp that James Comey’s revival of the email investigations just days before the election did more to kill her momentum than any thing the Russians did overtly or covertly. Indeed, given how close things were, had Hillary won, the Right might be saying that anybody BUT Trump could have beat her, given that he was the only Republican candidate who approached her negatives with the unconverted.

Another significant policy achievement of the Trump presidency is his three Supreme Court justices.

This is of course, the Right’s go-to justification for everything else.

This is also the crowning achievement of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell. For some reason, MAGA hates this man, and I have absolutely no idea why.

Because Mitch has an existence outside Donald Trump.

There are a few other accomplishments often brought up when constructing Trump’s presidential resume. The corporate-tax reform was a needed and important piece of legislation, not as — contrary to popular leftist lies — a support for the rich, but as a support for the job creation, business investment, capex, global competitiveness, repatriation of foreign profits, and reduction of loopholes it fostered. That this accomplishment actually went through a real legislative process makes it even more important — it cannot be reversed so easily, and it was actually done properly in the context of the Constitution.

True. And as you imply, if there was anything good about all this, and it is the sort of thing that any Republican would want, then that implies any Republican president would have pursued it. That begs the question of whether these gains were worth the loss of the Party’s reputation, and your words as a whole provide the answer.

I am glad the president relocated to the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, ended the Iranian nuclear deal, and pulled us out of the Paris accord. These things carry more symbolic than practical significance, but symbolic gestures do matter.

Given liberal Jews’ longstanding support for Israel, the fact that Democrats couldn’t bring themselves to take a similar position has less to do with the wonderful genius of Donald Trump (other than his capacity to push on with an idea no matter who it offends) and more to do with external factors: specifically the fact that Israeli government is even more dominated than American government by a “conservative” government that is even more corrupt and pandering to the fundamentalists than ours is, plus a realization on the Arab states’ part that they never really cared about the Palestinians much anyway, and were willing to trade them for deals with the US and help with containing Shia Iran.

It may seem like small ball to many of you, and with some of the ghastly pardons that are included in his actions, may even rub you the wrong way. But I would include the president’s pardons of Michael Milken and Conrad Black as two of his greatest hits. I’ve written enough about the Milken pardon but will celebrate it long after Trump is gone.

You’re right, David. Pardoning Milken in particular does rub me the wrong way. As a matter of fact, this one paragraph almost invalidates everything you say by itself. At Milken’s sentencing, Judge Kimba Wood told him: “You were willing to commit only crimes that were unlikely to be detected. … When a man of your power in the financial world… repeatedly conspires to violate, and violates, securities and tax business in order to achieve more power and wealth for himself… a significant prison term is required.”

I do not disagree with President Trump’s defenders that he has been one of the most pro-life presidents we have ever had.

I do.

His voice, rhetoric, public support, judicial appointments, and HHS personnel are high up in his report card for this tireless defending of the unborn.

Which is to say, years after he quit attending Jeffrey Epstein parties. Look, Republicans, you have to ask yourself what the endgame is here. If you honestly think abortion is murder at any point in pregnancy, then you can stop with nothing less than not only the repeal of Roe v. Wade but a Human Life Amendment or state laws to either ban abortion or do as good as. And even invalidating Roe v. Wade would mean that all the motivation and momentum leaves your side and goes to the baby-killer side, and if they can’t campaign against your scrubbed, fresh-faced young judges, they’re certainly going to campaign against the Senators that approved them. Your side is already the dog that caught the car. Soon, it’s going to shift in Reverse.

The Bad

Well, I’ve gone over this in extensive detail, but lets’ see what you think.

It is at this time that I regretfully suggest that the presidency has been an abject disaster in so many ways, not generally because of his policies, but because of the character, temperament, ego, and pathology of the president, that time and time again blotted out the good and undermined opportunities for success. Ultimately, it is my position that the things we were told didn’t matter inevitably damaged the things we were told did matter. [my emphasis]

This is my strongest point of agreement.

First, allow me to numerically offer categorical critiques that I believe warrant very little controversy on the Right. There is a certain sequence here, but they are not ranked in an order of importance:

1) “But he fights” is the most universally uttered argument in defense of President Trump, and in this phrase sits the core of my disagreement with MAGA world. “Yes, I know he tweets silly things sometimes, but at least he stands up to the media and cancel culture and the Left.” “I don’t like his temperament either, but he gets things done.” You know the lines to which I am referring, and they are universal from many who have supported President Trump.

Now, I would be happy to rebut the conclusions of this thinking — that because he “gets things done” and “stands up to the Left,” it is easy to tolerate the tweets, insults, conspiracy theories, childish behavior, boorishness, and so forth. I vehemently disagree with that thinking, but I will avoid even that argument, because this one is so much easier, and so much more undermining of that proposition: The temperament and behavior could not be ignored for the greater good, because the greater good to which you refer failed as a result of the temperament and behavior.

I spent four years pleading with people to understand that the president listened to the masses, and if he got pushback on his behavior, his craving for popularity would mean a shift in behavior. Instead of feeling pressured to change, he felt emboldened.

This should not be a surprise to so many people. We are dealing with a symbiosis. I have mentioned more times than I care to recall that Trump’s uncanny bond with his fan club is a case of identity fusion, or as the joke goes, Donald Trump is what the average Donald Trump fan would be if they had money. When you’re dealing with pivotal figures, there’s always a debate between the Hegelian position that history is formed by “great men” and the Marxist position that “great men” simply follow the mass and are subject to the same material circumstances. The truth is a little of both. If the “base” saw Trump in themselves, it’s not because they wanted a government that was more informed by F.A. Hayek or Thomas Aquinas. They wanted somebody who would run things the way they would if they got the chance. That’s exactly what happened. You can look at tapes of Donald Trump not that many years ago and see that even if he was no deep intellectual, he was at least articulate. Now all he can do is parrot the same slogans the Republican masses and their representatives have been parroting to each other for years, because a conman plays to the mark. It would be one thing if he were cynically manipulating that mass with lies and hate, but Trump has gotten high on his own supply to the extent that he resembles Al Pacino in the last scene of Scarface. Trump tells his lies to the crowd, and they cheer him on, so he eggs them on even more. They make each other worse.

But allow me to strike at the heart of what cost President Trump reelection: that first debate. I can criticize President Trump for much, but I do not criticize his marketing savvy and even his political instincts. How could I? President Trump either entered that first debate wanting to lose the election, or actually believing that the nation liked and wanted petulance of a variety we have never seen in American presidential history. Any review of the strategy he utilized in the second debate versus how he behaved in the first debate decimates the argument that “you have to let Trump be Trump.” As we saw in the second debate, he is highly capable of reining it in when he believes it will help him pragmatically. His performance in the second debate was masterful, not just because he articulated needed truth about the COVID moment, but because his temperament was sober, respectful, serious, and right. By then, nearly half of voting had already happened. The inability to empirically prove cause and effect does not change what we know instinctively to be true — his conduct at the first debate destroyed his candidacy.

Sir, if you think that Trump’s second debate was “masterful” and that he presented any truth about COVID, that is part of the problem.

But I will use even clearer data to make my case: Do you know that he still enjoyed high levels of approval and support even a month into the COVID moment? Even as death tolls were climbing and his own orders for national lockdown were decimating the economy, the country had not yet blamed President Trump for it. It is in this area that I vehemently disagree with many of my friends on the Right who have been outspoken critics of President Trump: The idea that he “caused the deaths of 300,000 Americans” is absurd. One can do revisionist history on what transpired in January and February of 2020 all they want, but there is very little President Trump could have done or should have done differently. “But he knew it was serious and did nothing.” What was he supposed to do? Shut down the economy before we had experienced a single death over a totally unknown and pre-understood respiratory virus? It’s partisan nonsense, and everyone knows it.

What’s partisan nonsense is dodging the point because it doesn’t fit your thesis. Trump indeed enjoyed high levels of support not only at the start of the COVID “moment” (such a lovely euphemism) but all the way through the election, not so much in Liberal Media opinion polls, but in the only poll that counted, the one taken in November. He just managed to alienate that many more people, or that many more people thought Joe Biden did a better imitation of a human being. No, he didn’t cause the deaths of 300,000 people… he just refused to ban China travel until their virus had already spread to Europe, declared the European travel ban on such short notice that airports were slammed with passengers trying to get back in the country in conditions ideal for spreading a virus, refused to admit there was a crisis in the first two months of the spread, shuffled Alex Azar and Mike Pence in control of the task force and then eventually took over their press conferences so he’d have a national audience for his blame-the-media pity party, belittled Dr. Fauci, belitted Dr. Birx, encouraged the herd immunity theory, and consistently treated masks as though they had cooties on them (which is kind of the point, actually).

TOTALLY NOT the same thing!

I do not know why so many decided that President Trump accusing Ted Cruz’s dad of killing JFK was acceptable or why the mocking statements about the physical appearance of Carly Fiorina and Heidi Cruz were tolerated during the 2016 campaign. But I do know that when the exact same behavior inevitably carried in the COVID moment of 2020, it was unpalatable for many Americans.

Not nearly enough of them.

I am not suggesting that President Trump lost in 2020 because he tweeted that President Obama faked the killing of Osama bin Laden and had Seal Team Six killed. Rather, I am suggesting that he tweeted it because he thought he could. A numbness had built up such that the totally unacceptable became ignored. And in a 40-40-20 country, on the margin, it was political suicide — not merely this tweet, but the entire lot of them.

And that’s what your party hasn’t figured out, David. You were scared of that 40/40/20 margin going the wrong way, and rather than do anything to counter that other 40 or wean the 20 in the middle to your view, you doubled down on stupid. “he tweeted it because he thought he could.” Yes… and who gave him that impression?

2) Those who believe the federal government is too large, should be reined it, should spend less, should extract less money from the private sector, and should seek a greater fiscal responsibility have surrendered any semblance of credibility for years. It has to be said that this is not just because we spent trillions of dollars more than ever thought possible — and this was before the COVID stimulus packages.

I understand there was excessive spending in past Republican and Democratic administrations, but there were always objectors. The Tea Party movement was a response to profligate spending under the Obama administration. And during the Bush Jr. spending years, there was a significant, though inadequate, resistance from the Right in the House and Senate. Trump did not merely spend us into oblivion, he got the “freedom caucus” to spend us into oblivion. He wasn’t hypocritical. Bush Jr. said he favored right-sized government, and then overspent. Trump overspent, and said it was because he didn’t favor right-sized government.

Hi. Welcome to the Libertarian Party.

Thanks for acknowledging that the Republicans never really gave a rat’s tail about government restraint in the first place and certainly didn’t under Trump. As you say, the difference between Trump and the respectable cloth-coat Republicans is that Trump didn’t bother with the hypocrisy. But Hey – he’s authentic!

The various cultural fears I alluded to earlier have been used as an excuse for his entire term in office to ignore the economic recklessness playing out both in deed and word, and yet having ceded the high ground to the leftist argument for size of government, spending, and budget math, we will now face the cultural ramifications of abandoning basic first things. I want to be clear — I am not merely worried that the Left will now call us hypocrites regarding spending; I am worried because it is true. And it is not true because we said one thing and did another.

Faced with a big-spending Republican president who said he wanted negative interest rates, trillions of dollars of deficits, and unlimited budget increases in each category, the GOP House and Senate, either afraid of a mean tweet, a MAGA primary opponent, or perhaps genuinely converted by the intellectual force of the Trumpian argument, capitulated. I cannot imagine what it will take to establish credibility. And when Democratic spending offends us, I cannot imagine what many in MAGA will say. For many, they would be wise to sit that argument out.

In the immortal word of Cher Horowitz, “DUH.” To paraphrase, the things you were told – ahem, the things WE told YOU – did matter were things you thought didn’t matter, and for the sake of your goals, you killed the things you say do matter. Almost as if the venal cult of personality and the chance to “fight back and make liberals cry” mattered to you more than Christian ethics or responsible government, otherwise you wouldn’t have done so much to enable a guy who makes Bill Clinton’s impeachment case look like a parking ticket. Now nobody believes you as a moral authority, and they certainly won’t take you seriously when you look at Joe Biden’s spending agenda and realize that you’re supposed to be the party of fiscal responsibility. The irony being that your most libertarian, pro-capitalist president EVAR hollowed out small business to such a great extent with the effects of Trump Virus means that we’re actually going to need that massive Keynesian spending to prime the pump. You’re doing more to justify the left-socialist spectrum than anything they could do with their limited imaginations. “I am not merely worried that the Left will now call us hypocrites regarding spending; I am worried because it is true.” As the kids say these days, sounds like a You problem.

3) One of the major premises of the Trump presidency was that he would bring in the competence and get-stuff-done mentality of a businessman to Washington. The results may set back the cause of a private-sector businessman fixing Washington for decades. The constant “palace intrigue” management style of the president (a style that sits at the heart of his business philosophy, too), created the most volatile and unstable White House staff and cabinet in generations.

Several fine patriots of great prestige and competence have come into the administration, and I differ with those Trump critics who believe those patriots had a duty to leave when Trump misbehaved throughout his presidency. I am quite confident that those who were on the “A-team” of the administration represented a superior alternative to the reality TV stars and campaign grifters who could have potentially replaced them.

Well, this is again what you get when you let your projections blind you to the fact that Trump was never a successful billionaire, he just played one on TV. And yes: the results will set back the chance for a similar pitch for decades. We can only hope. As for the ‘A-Team’ giving way to the grifters, what do you expect? Trump doesn’t want competent people, because he’s incompetent, and at core, jealous and insecure because of that. He wants bottom-feeders who look up to him because that treats his insecurity. The results are what we got. Geez Louise, if liberals could figure that out, why couldn’t National Review? It seems erudition and culture aren’t everything.

…It is my humble, gracious, yet unwavering view that what many of the president’s supporters see (and love) as a “won’t back down/fight the Left” attitude, is really a character malady that happens to sometimes align with the Right’s agenda.

Quite.

… Let us dispel of the myth that the only options are the gentlemanly passivity and ineffectualness of a Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney, or else the vulgarity and narcissism of Donald Trump. Have we truly come to a place where we do not believe we can engage the cultural and political fights of the day with energy, force, and boldness, yet without the self-defeating traits of ego and childishness that so often defined President Trump? Is this not the falsest dilemma of our time?

David, I think this whole essay is a therapeutic attempt to avoid coming to grips with the fact that you already know the answer to that question, and you don’t want to say it.

Reagan gave us “Morning in America.” Trump gave us “American Carnage.” Literally. That says it all.

Reagan won 49 states in 1984. Trump’s one clear victory was only because certain key states had a margin of “third” party votes exceeding the difference between Trump and Clinton, which liberals never fail to remind me. Reagan didn’t need to come up with ghost stories and fish tales about stolen ballots and landslides, because he earned what he got. Republicans used to be popular. Even with Dubya, they were sorta popular. Not anymore. To go back to Republican budget hypocrisy, I think that’s a lot more consequential than whether Republicans are supposedly racist. For one thing, we all know how many more black and Hispanic votes Trump got this time. For another thing, institutional racism is a problem that will ultimately solve itself as demographics change. The question is what kind of government we have, and if “conservatives” keep screaming about socialism but are just as spendthrift and statist, they have no claim to be an alternative.

Wailing and worrying about association with Trump betrays the point that you followed him because, for one thing, he really was the most popular and competent national politician you had. If you had anybody better, you would have taken them, cause at one point you did have better. For another, just as the “base” influences the leadership, the reverse is also true. I like to say that this was the Party of Trump for years before 2015, Republicans were just waiting for him to show up. For years “Tea Party” people had gone past legitimate skepticism of Big Government to attacks on government per se, and they arranged things so that you had to appeal to their wingnuttery just to win a primary, even though candidates had to tack left and pretend to be moderate to appeal to the general audience. Trump showed them they could get their populism straight from the tap.

The respectable, cloth-coat Republicans, like the ones who work for National Review (or used to) have scared themselves into thinking that rather than challenge the opposition 40 percent or adapt to the middle 20 percent and poach them from the Enemy, they have to stick with the “base” and adopt counter-majoritarian tactics to make sure that’s enough. And since that really isn’t enough, they’re scared to death of losing the once-Tea Party/now-Trumpnik/future-Q people. No one in the Trumpnik movement has ever stopped to think that they would be in that much more of a demographic slide if the respectable conservatives left them instead. I wonder why.

The Way Forward

I agree with those critical of the president that there will likely be a period of reckoning ahead, but I do not agree that we ought to hope for such. Rooting for various dependable conservative Senators to lose for blood-sport because they tried to thread the needle in dealing with Trump these last few years is counter-productive. Seeking to “cancel” those who dared to bring some competence and productivity to the administration is silly, unfair, and wrong.

These are Senators we’re dealing with. Lindsey Graham is fine. Tommy Tuberville is fine. Mitch McConnell is fine. The only way people like that lose in this system is if they’ve made themselves that unpopular, and that takes a lot more than “cancel culture.”

…If I could wave a wand and make it so, we would have a resurgence of fusionism tomorrow — this time juxtaposing a toughness in demeanor, an appeal to disenfranchised working-class voters, and traditional movement conservatives. I see nothing contradictory in any of those three components, and I see no choice of forward progress for our movement (politically) without all three for the time being.

Another assortment of a “Big Tent.” A wise position: Except it has to acknowledge that the last Big Tent of Christianists, libertarians and neocons collapsed because their views are really not that compatible in the end, and the working-class and “traditional” (Christianist) people are even less so. The fact that factions are contradictory doesn’t mean that a coalition can’t be formed – it’s been done before. But that takes not only leadership but intellect. “Toughness”, while necessary, is not synonymous with leadership and it certainly isn’t synonymous with intellect.

The war big tech seems determined to fight against conservatives is not going to make this dynamic any easier. Many will get bogged down by the technical details of Section 230 and big tech’s freedom as private companies. Others still will demand exhaustive regulation and reversals, allowing their desperation to move them from the frying pan to the fire. A Trumpian authoritarianism is more palatable to so many than Silicon Valley authoritarianism, but I prefer neither. When I am asked if I want what we have these last few years, or a Silicon Valley dominance in partnership with a woke Democratic Party, my answer is, “None of the above.” We have every right and every chance to work for an affirmative vision of our movement, now. In fact, we have every duty to do so.

Hey, David, there’s at least one party that’s “None of the above.”

Ultimately, the substantial phenomena of Trump’s personality is what has to fade for conservatives, not merely meaning his personality, but the excessive reliance on personality. All things being equal, I am quite sure the GOP has little chance of winning a presidential election without a candidate of forceful and charismatic personality. But as Matthew Continetti suggests, what is needed now is a “depersonalization of the right.” We will need dynamic and high-character people to deliver, and yes, they will have to be fighters.

A very good point actually. As much as pre-Trump Republicans seemed to worship Reagan, they did not make him a personality cult the way they did Trump. But that again betrays the fact that they’ve got nothing else to work with. Paradoxically, for a political party to depersonalize, it has to have more than one personality.

But if we care about the size of the state, the character of the country, the virtue of the people, the futures of our children, the protection of our Constitution, and a permanent defeat of the forces of socialism and collectivism, we are best advised to fight these evils with less reliance on the mere appeal of a big personality and more commitment to defensible principles.

I want to reiterate my empathy for those who feel we are on the losing side of a culture war and need reinforcements that include the “strength” and “toughness” of Donald Trump. We are in a culture war and a debacle of secular-humanist wokeism, and we will need strength and toughness to prevail.

[much dross follows in conclusion]

For people who go on so much about strength and toughness, you’re more Princess-and-the-Pea than all the social media lefties.

It never seems to have occurred to you that people of a generically conservative temperament ARE the majority in this country – and by ‘conservative’ I mean, keeping the traditions that work, gradually changing the things that don’t, making the system work for everyone and using common sense. I DON’T mean “we hate abortion and gays.” This is why Biden, who differs with his Church on the abortion issue, comes off as more Christian and Middle American than Trump, who has probably paid more for abortions than for building contracts. You’re losing not because the great middle disagrees with you about the Left. They don’t. That’s the only reason you’ve managed to coast this long. The Left is starting to beat you anyway because for all the photos you show of riots and burning in the BLM protests, you’re the ones in charge of the national agenda – right up to January 20, 2021. And you, by your own actions, have made the Democrats and Left look like the sane alternative to you.

You can only get so far on empty promises and propaganda and “no matter how much you hate us, those guys are always worse.” That didn’t work for Hillary Clinton. How long did you think it would work for you?

Don’t try to present yourselves as the sane alternative to the Left until you actually become that. If you want to, that is. To paraphrase from above, “And when Democratic (policy) offends us, I cannot imagine what many in MAGA will say. For many, they would be wise to sit that argument out.”

Lock Him Up, Continued

Yeah, I should’ve known that an impeachment seven days after the president incites an insurrection is as fast as this government is ever gonna get.

Still, given that the process didn’t start until after the weekend was over, the second impeachment of Donald Trump did conclude remarkably fast, in less than 24 hours, after it officially started. It actually had ten Republicans on board, which is the most defections from the defendant’s party in any presidential impeachment case. And since there have only been four impeachments of a president in American history, and Trump has made history by being impeached twice, he has also attained an achievement in having half of them all by himself.

Not like it matters that much, since Mitch McConnell (in direct contrast to his Operation Warp Speed-like maneuvering to fill Justice Ginsburg’s Supreme Court seat) is not convening the Senate until at least January 19, so while it is legal to impeach a president after he has left office, those of us who think Trump should get kicked out and Go Directly To Jail, Do Not Collect $250,000 are going to be disappointed. Actually disappointment isn’t the issue, it’s how much damage Putin’s little boy can still do in six days.

“Mr. President, you’ve just become the first president to be impeached twice after inciting insurrection! What are you going to do NEXT?”
“I’m gonna start a nuclear war, so I can go for the hat trick!”

In a certain respect it’s actually better for the prosecution (Democrats) that the Senate trial proceed after the government changes hands, because with the Senate tied, a Democratic Vice President (Kamala Harris) as legal head of the Senate, gives that party the majority, meaning the prosecution case isn’t going to have the legs cut out from under it right at the get-go the way McConnell did in the last impeachment. (But on the bright side, Republicans, it looks like the president gets impeached every January from now on.) On the other hand, you still need 67 Senators to convict, meaning 17 Republicans (or 18, if Democrat Joe Manchin wants to uphold his conservative reputation). And the likelihood is against that, precisely because the stakes are that conviction would lead to a second vote to bar the former president from any future Federal office (which requires only a simple majority) the internal Republican Party support for Trump in both his 2020 challenge and a future 2024 campaign is still a majority. It’s also assumed that if Trump is no longer in the picture that Republicans will see less need to act so boldly against him. The problem with that “let’s just move on” posture is precisely that Trump will never give up the spotlight willingly, and the Party has brought itself to this crossroads precisely because they would not confront him. The fact that some Republicans (including McConnell and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski) are willing to even entertain the idea of convicting him on that basis indicates that they’re foresighted enough to get him out of the picture. But ultimately this Senate trial, like the last one, is less the Democratic Party pressing its already known opinion on Trump and more the Republican Party decision as to whether it wishes to continue being ruled by him, even as the costs start to outweigh the benefits.

The prosecution at least is going to be pretty straightforward based on the article of impeachment: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/1/13/incitement-of-insurrection-impeachment-resolution-full-text “On January 6, 2021, pursuant to the 12th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, the Vice President of the United States, the House of Representatives, and the Senate met at the United States Capitol for a Joint Session of Congress to count the votes of the Electoral College. In the months preceding the Joint Session, President Trump repeatedly issued false statements asserting that the Presidential election results were the product of widespread fraud and should not be accepted by the American people or certified by State or Federal officials. Shortly before the Joint Session commenced, President Trump, addressed a crowd at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C. There, he reiterated false claims that “we won this election, and we won it by a landslide.” He also willfully made statements that, in context, encouraged – and foreseeably resulted in – lawless action at the Capitol, such as: “if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country any more.” Thus incited by President Trump, members of the crowd he had addressed, in an attempt to, among other objectives, interfere with the Joint Session’s solemn constitutional duty to certify the results of the 2020 Presidential election, unlawfully breached and vandalized the Capitol, injured and killed law enforcement personnel, menaced Members of Congress, the Vice President, and Congressional personnel, and engaged in other violent, deadly, destructive and seditious acts.”

Lest one think this is taken out of context, here is the text of Trump’s “Stop the Steal” speech, all the rambling and interrupting chants included: https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-speech-save-america-rally-transcript-january-6 Notably he mentions how “They’ll knock out Lincoln too, by the way. They’ve been taking his statue down, but then we signed a little law. You hurt our monuments, you hurt our heroes, you go to jail for 10 years and everything stopped.” But I’m sure the part Trump would want emphasized is “We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” Never mind that in Trumpworld, “peaceful protest” is code for “all these darkies get to march in the streets without masks on, so why can’t we?”

The legal question then is, is Trump legally liable if he didn’t specifically tell people to hunt the Vice President and Congress?

There was a completely unrelated question on Quora, I can’t find it now, but it was basically “what is a great detail in a movie scene?” And one person answered with one of the courtroom scenes in A Few Good Men, where Cruise’s defense attorney questions a corporal, the prosecutor (Kevin Bacon) comes up with a line of argument to undermine Cruise’s assertion, and Cruise comes back up with another line of questioning that proves his point. And as they take the witness off the stand, Cruise walks back to his desk and the camera shows Bacon nodding in rueful admiration of Cruise’s skill. That was considered to be an example of good character detail.

But I bring up that particular scene because of the specific context and dialogue.

In A Few Good Men, two Marines are up for court-martial due to the death of a recruit at Guantanamo Bay. Lieutenant Kaffee, Cruise’s character, has a Corporal Barnes from the unit on the stand (played by Noah Wyle) and goes into several questions asking him to detail a “Code Red”, which is basically a hazing process designed to break down a Marine who seems to be screwing up. The prosecutor, Captain Ross, gets up and gives the corporal the Marine outline for recruit training and asks him to detail the regulation involving the use of Code Red. He can’t. He then picks up the manual for the garrison at Guantanamo Bay and asks the corporal where the use of Code Red is. The corporal just says that “Code Red” is a term for an informal process, meaning it’s off the books. Ross’ point is that the defense can’t bring up a process that’s not in regulations as though the defendants were giving orders. But as he walks back, Kaffee gets up, snatches the book out of Ross’ hand and asks the corporal to describe where in the Guantanamo manual he would find the mess hall. And Barnes says he can’t. And Kaffee asks if he never had a meal on the base then, and Barnes says of course he did. So Kaffee asks, “I don’t understand, how would you know where the mess hall is, if it’s not in this book?” And Corporal Barnes just says, “Well I guess I just followed the crowd at chowtime, sir.”

You don’t need to know what the specific order is. You just follow the crowd at chowtime.

This goes with the often-mentioned similarity between Trump and the New York mob, specifically the “Teflon Don”, John Gotti, who craved the spotlight more than most Mafia bosses. A reporter who covered the Mob confirmed that the similarity is somewhat intentional: “It’s important to remember that Trump learned his ABCs for success from Roy Cohn, who was mixed up in the Mafia, defended them, and mentored Trump exactly how to succeed in life. “Always be aggressive, take no prisoners …”

“Trump resembles John Gotti. Most mob bosses were quiet, stayed in the shadows, didn’t want any kind of publicity or exposure. All Gotti wanted was the spotlight, all the time. That bolstered his ego, made him feel important. …Gotti would never say, “Hit that guy.” He’d just say, “Do me a favor, get rid of that stone in my shoe.” He would just say, “He’s a problem.” You never caught Gotti saying, “Let’s do a hit job on him,” but the understanding is clear to their acolytes. They know what the code words mean. … Just remember, Roy Cohn. He taught him his ABCs. He was a mentor. Trump was proud of it! Remember that line about, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” The government works for him; he doesn’t work for the government.”

Not only that, there is legal precedent with the case in question. An article in Politico goes over the potential problems for Trump: “As a person with good lawyers and experience being investigated, Trump would undoubtedly claim these comments were nothing more than First-Amendment-protected political speech if he were charged with encouraging the mob to commit seditious conspiracy. But that might not help. In 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Brandenberg v Ohio, found that the government can punish inflammatory speech when it is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”

So did Trump know that his statements were “likely” to produce imminent lawless action?

Well, in his NOW BANNED Twitter account, Trump said “JANUARY SIXTH, SEE YOU IN DC!” after also saying “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” For weeks, Trump supporters fed by his own mythologizing on Twitter and rumors spread amongst themselves and the Q Anon network, organized for a protest specifically timed for the Elector count on January 6, even before Republican Congressman Louie Gohmert and Senator Josh Hawley announced their intent to contest the slate. “The story of how the pied-pipers of Trumpism enlisted supporters illustrates the dramatic evolution of Trump’s voters into an effective and well-financed network of activist groups. The crowds that rally organizers recruited were joined in Washington by more radical right-wing groups that have increasingly become a fixture at pro-Trump demonstrations – including white supremacists and devotees of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which casts Trump as a savior figure and elite Democrats as a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles and cannibals. “

Trump also knew that the people doing his bidding in denying coronavirus strategies by state governments were willing to take violent extremes. A month before the election, Trump’s own FBI announced charges against 13 men in a plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, “and otherwise violently overthrow the state government.” Now most of the time it’s extremely easy for Trump to plead ignorance, but it stretches credibility for him to say he was unaware of what people say about him on social media, especially pro-Trump networks that repeat his opinions and support his position that opposition to his rule is illegal by definition.

It was that much harder for Trump to deny the potential for violence when he came to the outdoor podium on January 6 and saw exactly how many people were outside ready to respond to what he had to say. I’m not sure if he would have seen the hanging scaffold that someone set up for Mike Pence. And while he did indeed say “We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard” he also used fascist bullyboy code language like “We’re going walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators, and congressmen and women. We’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong” and “The Democrats are hopeless. They’re never voting for anything, not even one vote. But we’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help, we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”

So certainly there’s more legal basis for a criminal claim – both in the context of impeachment and outside it – than “you’re mean, and you’re haters, and you’re meanie haters, and you just want to take down the bestest most Americanest president we’ve had since Jesus.”

But as I keep saying: Not like it matters. Because in this government, the only way you can stop a malicious incompetent from doing this much damage as President is not to elect him in the first place, and that’s very difficult when the duopoly does even more than the Constitution to enforce a first-past-the-post election system, and that binary logic thus causes a huge plurality of America to program themselves into thinking that the only alternative to the Democratic Party is the designated official NotDemocrat party, even if that party endorses the most cuckooland nonsense, because you don’t want to be a DEMOCRAT, do you?? And because that self same election system causes all political functions in the Federal government to be apportioned between the two parties, and again, you’ve got that 2/3 requirement to convict on an impeachment, you’re most likely not going to get even 1/3 of the 50 Republicans required to convict their Leader, even knowing he started a brushfire without caring if they got burned. And that’s only partly because there’s a genuine (M)ob intimidation campaign against them. In other cases the identity fusion with Trump is just that strong, and even the more sensible people refuse to do anything constructive because that would be seen as surrendering to the Democrats.

This is why there are several reforms being proposed – such as creating DC and Puerto Rico as Democrat-friendly Senate bastions (giving statehood to DC would also mean they’re not waiting on Federal approval to restore order in the district), or severely reducing the lame-duck period so that sedition campaigns against a lawful election don’t have nearly as much time to brew.

These reforms are almost as unlikely to work as impeachment and removal of a president by the Senate, because even if they weren’t specifically intended to cripple one of the two parties, the Republicans will certainly perceive that intent. The only solution then would be the long-term process going on now, in which the Republicans continue to alienate the center of the country. But Democrats learned from 2020 that they can’t count on every race, especially in “red” states, going their way, and they have every reason to suspect that if the sitting president’s party (theirs) loses seats in the midterm, as they are expected to do in 2022, Mitch (the Bitch) McConnell will do exactly what he did to Obama after 2010 and hamstring Joe Biden as much as possible and use that as the pitch for why Republicans should retake the White House. And if Trump is not in prison, and still has an audience, there’s every reason to suspect he will get nominated again, and win the White House again, because certainly no one in his party is going to stop him.

Which is why, in terms of having a national audience, the strongest consequence of Trump’s little stunt on January 6 wasn’t yet another impeachment trial where his pet political party can enable him yet again. It was getting kicked off social media, especially Twitter.

Simply not having his media megaphone seems to have demoralized Trump to the point that he isn’t even trying to get his message out to the public, even though he has all the pre-Twitter methods that a president has historically had to communicate, including TV. Except he’s sort of alienated Fox News, too.

But while the Left has embraced Twitter’s decision in the short term, it’s inspired them to a lot of tut-tutting about the control that Twitter and other corporations have over social discourse. Even Jack Dorsey has admitted this is an issue.

I personally think the system is working, at least now that it’s finally reached the extreme. I don’t think that we should be passing more laws on these media platforms, and ironically the people who want to get rid of Section 230 (including Trump) are blanking out the point that removing the platforms’ shield of liability would have only created the result that has already happened, where the companies de-platformed Trump and his goons on their own, because he was becoming a liability to their reputations (such that their own employees were near revolt) and potentially a legal liability.

The solution would have been for Twitter and Facebook to enforce THEIR OWN RULES of conduct that they are perfectly willing to impose on Joe Schmo, but no, because Trump is a big time celebrity (and incidentally the president) every excretion from that upper colon he calls a brain is “newsworthy.” All I know is, if Trump had posted more than two topless photographs, Facebook would’ve banned him for life.

Supposedly others have pointed out that if someone in the private sector had said half the stuff that Trump said on Twitter as a matter of course, they would lose their job. And we can say this because a lot of Trump’s supporters got fired from their jobs after they joined the Beer Belly Putsch January 6 and bragged about it on social media. And yet both the traditionally anti-capitalist Left and the woke conservatives who suddenly realized that capitalists are dictating terms to politicians are unable to regulate a threat to public safety half as expediently as Twitter did by removing Donald Trump’s power within their medium, which he has less claim to than he has to the Republican Party.

This is part of why I’m libertarian, because I think that private business is often doing a better job of regulating itself and reading the consequences of its public actions than government regulators do. And if I were liberal, I would be concerned not just that reactionaries are trying to take over the government, and not just that private companies have so much control over public activity, but that private businesses, as mercenary and dysfunctional as they are, are still regulating themselves better than the public sector is able to regulate and reform itself.

LOCK HIM UP

The Twenty-Fifth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States

Section 4. Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

Well, it was long past time, but it’s certainly time now.

In 2016, Republicans were going, “We can’t have the president elected by majority vote! We need the Electoral College, or else the government will be held hostage to an unqualified demagogue and his gullible angry mob!”
Republicans in 2021 formed a gullible angry mob at the behest of an unqualified demagogue and stormed the Capitol building in order to stop fellow Republicans from lawfully contesting the Electoral College slate.

This was, of course, after Donald Trump, who is not the POTUS, but the PLBB (Putin’s Little Bitch Boy), encouraged the masses of people who he told to come out and party with him today on Twitter, telling them “we’ll walk down, and I’ll be there with you… to the Capitol, to cheer on our brave Congressmen and women” and then scurried off to his limo and drove back to his bunker to watch TV and bask in the results of his work. To smile, and laugh, and have a little joke at the expense of all his followers. At Mike Pence. At Mitch McConnell. At all the people who’d ever stood up for him. To watch reporters take pictures of the yahoos in the House and Senate chambers, looting the offices and carrying Confederate flags.

Jefferson Davis, thou art avenged.

Make no mistake, even though there were quite a few Republicans willing to continue the charade of contesting the Electoral slate, Trump put the mob up to this, against his own party’s lawful request to contest the results, because he knew that would fail, and he knew that he would lose his last chance to keep America as the favorite satellite country in Putin’s new Warsaw Pact.

This, like the Trump arm twist of Georgia’s Secretary of State, was the tactic of a mob boss. As in, “I’ve got a mob, I got my boys, you better be nice to me, cause if I don’t get my way, my boys are gonna make things ugly. You don’t want it to get ugly, do ya?”

As I write, the Senate has reconvened, and Georgia Senator Loeffler, one of the opportunists who had jumped on that bandwagon, and just lost her seat probably because of it, took the floor in a subdued voice and withdrew her objection to the slate of Electors. It seems as though most of the people, at least in the Senate, who were going to support this little stunt in order to give Trump and his army of babies a pacifier changed their minds, perhaps because they now see that there’s no way to pacify them, perhaps because, like Loeffler, it’s now too late to save themselves, and others because they now know that if they want to save their political careers, they need to choose between the mob and the rest of the country.

So what was going to be at least a symbolic triumph for the Party of Trump in the Congress (and remember kids: moral victories don’t count) has been completely dashed because of the real Party of Trump that what’s left of the Republican Party was trying to keep a lid on.

Good JOB, Trumpniks.

But what happens now?

Do we just say, “Oh thank goodness, that’s over. Let’s go back to normal”?
FUCK that. The Trumpniks don’t want normal. They want war.
It would be impolite to deny them.

As the TV talking heads point out, Trump is still president for two more weeks, and he can do a lot. Or as Trump would say, A LOT. There is now a movement in Congress, supported by Rep. Ilhan Omar among others, to impeach Trump AGAIN. It’s doubtful that would work, since even if McConnell isn’t able to gum up the works as Senate Majority Leader, you still need 2/3 of the Senate to actually remove an official. I’d still like to see it happen, just so Trump can make the history books yet again, but that’s gonna take at least 14 days, and we don’t have that kind of time.

We do not want Putin’s Little Bitch Boy in charge of the nuclear weapons.

It has also been suggested that we invoke the 25th Amendment. This is a bit more realistic. And I think it’s telling that the recent reports are saying that it was Mike Pence, not Trump, who approved sending the National Guard to DC after the shenanigans. But that’s probably because even now, Trump cares more about the perks of being president (such as, FBI immunity) than actually being one.

Just now (after 9 Eastern) Democrat Steny Hoyer mentioned how he remembered being in the Capitol when the country was assaulted from without, on 9-11. This is an assault from within.

This is the domestic 9-11.

Trump should be IMMEDIATELY removed from office, along with anybody else who wants to continue this stunt, under the terms of the 14th Amendment, which to repeat states: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

Not only should Trump be removed from office, the Republican Party should at least have the guts of Facebook and Twitter in even temporarily removing Trump from their platforms. Trump should be expelled from the Republican Party immediately and permanently, or they will have learned nothing, they will not be able to break from this mistake, and the rest of the country should treat them as the party of sedition.

In conclusion, I leave you with the immortal words of Senator Lindsey Graham:

When he’s right, he’s right.

Georgia On My Mind

Wow, just when we thought Viceroy Trump couldn’t do more to stage a coup or do so in a more incompetent and incriminating fashion, here we are.

Sunday January 3, somebody released a recording of a call that Trump and his staff (including Mark Meadows) made in conference with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger AND his attorney Ryan Germany. This ended up getting sent to the Washington Post and is available online. In this call, which lasted over an hour because Trump rambled, wandered, conjured conspiracies and made up big fish stories in his Racist-Uncle-at-Thanksgiving way, Trump insisted several times that “there’s no way I lost Georgia” despite Raffensberger telling him several times that the numbers were not with him, he told Raffensberger, who is in charge of election tallies, “The people of Georgia know that this was a scam, and because of what you’ve done to the president, a lot of people aren’t going out to vote. A lot of Republicans are going to vote negative because they hate what you did to the president.” He added: “You would be respected if this thing could be straightened out before the election.” How did he propose to do this? He said: “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state.” In other words, start with the result I want, and create the statistic I know to achieve it.

This is of course Oh We’ve Got Trump’s Ass On A Rack And He’s Cooked For Sure THIS Time incident #14547, cause no matter how many times little baby gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar, his pet political party is so pussywhipped that they really will give him legal immunity even if he did shoot someone on 5th Avenue. Not to mention the fact that the learned-helplessness contingent of the government (aka The Democratic Party) wouldn’t do anything even if the Banana Republican Party was standing out of the way. Still, with Trump trying to Stop The Steal with an actual steal, it’s telling that the Church of Trump is more determined to create a dogma to explain this paradox of faith than Christianity is at explaining, say, why we even need Jesus if Mary was without sin. At one point Trumpnik Jason Miller scream-tweeted that the Post had only released 4 to 6 minutes of the call, apparently under the impression that the entire thing would exonerate The Leader. It’s possible the WP released the entire thing just to piss in his mouth. Then you had several other members of the Church twitting that because Trump had the state of Georgia under a lawsuit for the election results that releasing the audio was illegal and a breach of the legal action. I presume that Mr. Germany is a better lawyer than (say) Sidney Powell, and could have notified Raffensberger if that was in fact the case. For somebody who so clearly wants to be a Mob boss, Trump still hasn’t figured out that “he was wearing a wire” isn’t a legal defense.

This in fact was only the escalation of the continuing campaign of the Party of Trump to assist him in his wishful thinking and denial. Last week, Rep. Louie Gohmert (BR-Gohmert) sent a lawsuit to force Vice President Mike Pence, in his official position as presiding officer of the Senate, to accept “alternate electors” (i.e. Acolytes in the Church of Trump) over the Electors officially approved after the ‘safe harbor’ point. A lawsuit, by the way, which was thrown out by Saturday. But Gohmert was also one of the first to demand a challenge of the Electors on what would normally be a pro forma certification of the election on January 6. For this challenge to proceed, Gohmert or another Representative would need to be supported by at least one Senator, and despite Mitch McConnell imposing an iron discipline on his caucus otherwise, Senator Josh Hawley (BR-Missouri) just came out to support the motion, which everyone knows is going to fail, if only because the Democrats still have a majority in the House and there won’t be enough Republicans to support it. But at this point it’s all about playing to the ex-Tea Party/now Trumpnik/future Qanon “base”. And given how everybody tells me that Hawley is NOT a blithering idiot (as opposed to Gohmert), and therefore must know that Trump isn’t going to roll over and let somebody else get the presidential nomination in 2024 if Trump (or at least one of his genespawn) can get it, I have to assume Hawley is pandering to that crowd for his future political ambitions on the assumption that Trump will soon have to change his accommodations from separate beds with Melania to sharing a cell with a 7-foot Samoan named “Desiree.” The joke, of course, is that the smart Republicans refused to take down Trump in 2016 before he got too big for his britches, cause they didn’t want to alienate that precious “base.” And that’s why Trump is now dragging them all by the shorthairs.

Not to mention that a lot of institutional Republican paralysis is that they can’t afford to buck The Leader when there’s still a runoff election in the two US Senate races in Georgia, which due to weak but still net-positive Democratic gains in the chamber mean that if both those races are lost, Mitch “the Bitch” is no longer Senate Majority Leader because it would be 50-50 and Kamala Harris would break ties. And most polls show the two Democratic challengers barely edging the Republican incumbents. At this point, it all comes down to seeing if the Republicans’ Election Day vote floods the Democrats’ early vote the way it did in so many elections elsewhere. But the early numbers are not looking good for Republicans. But it may not matter. If the Trumpniks realize that their Leader’s back is really against the wall, they may rally to save him from all the lesbians, atheists and other Democrats.

Here’s the thing. I’ve often discussed how the process of government resembles both role-playing games and old-time boardgames in that there are Rules As Written (in this case, the Constitution) and the house rules everybody uses, which in this case are the various rules of Congress and unwritten “norms” by which the system really works day to day, which is part of why the “rule of law” Democrats (who didn’t care much for the ‘rule of law’ the last time we had a pathological liar and real-estate cheat in the White House) are so helpless against Trump, because they don’t operate on laws, just norms.

But with both the Trump Party stunt against the Electoral vote and Trump himself pulling a Zelensky on Raffensberger, it seems to have gone a lot further than that.

Most boardgames always use the same set of components, so if you play Monopoly or Risk, you’re always playing a variation on the same game. But in 2011, Hasbro released RISK Legacy, which was unique and controversial because it was specifically designed to be altered in play. For instance: “What makes this game unique is that when powers are chosen, players must choose one of their faction’s two powers, affix that power’s sticker to their faction card, then destroy the card that has the other rule on it – and by destroy, the rules mean what they say: ‘If a card is DESTROYED, it is removed from the game permanently. Rip it up. Throw it in the trash.’ This key concept permeates through the game. Some things you do in a game will affect it temporarily, while others will affect it permanently. These changes may include boosting the resources of a country (for recruiting troops in lieu of the older ‘match three symbols’ style of recruiting), adding bonuses or penalties to defending die rolls to countries, or adding permanent continent troop bonuses that may affect all players. The rule book itself is also designed to change as the game continues, with blocks of blank space on the pages to allow for rules additions or changes. Entire sections of rules will not take effect until later in the game.” This brand actually inspired a whole new genre called the legacy game, which is based on the idea that the game as bought is to some degree permanently altered in play.

The US government prior to Donald Trump was Monopoly or Risk. The US government under Donald Trump is Risk Legacy.

The only way the “rule of law” marshmallows are going to actually have the rule of law back is to admit that is exactly what we do not have now, and we are not operating under the set of rules we think we are. And in some respect we have not been operating under the Rules As Written for quite some time. You want to go back to vanilla Risk, then you buy a new board of vanilla Risk at the department store and start over with the REAL rules system, because this is Risk Legacy, and half the board is in the garbage can.

That means, among other things, using ALL resources at one’s disposal to slam the people who are trying to subvert the government. When the Congressional Trumpniks announced their scheme to make their gold-plated calf President For Life, a lot of leftists went over the 14th Amendment, specifically Section 3, which states: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.” This, along with the other sections, was passed because there were in fact a bunch of Confederate state representatives who had been kicked out of Congress in 1861 after secession, and the Union needed to make sure that such behavior was not rewarded after the Civil War. We had not needed to consider it until now because we didn’t have a bunch of redneck reactionaries trying to overthrow the government through the Congress until now. And when the idea of kicking the Trumpniks out of the new Congress was first proposed, I thought it was too harsh. But after Sunday? Fuck ’em.

At the very least, make sure any Representative who signed the petition to contest the Electors, and any Senator who supports the challenge, lose all their committee assignments for the duration of the Congress, because that’s all these vain little creatures really care about anyway.

You can’t end the game and set up a new one if the other players are still playing a completely different game without you. Bad enough that it’s Risk Legacy, but with Republicans, you’re gonna have a situation where they’re playing Risk Legacy and Trump is playing Calvinball.

You want the rule of law? Start enforcing the law for a change.

You don’t do that, it doesn’t matter if Democrats win Georgia.

Goodnight 2020

Fuck 2020

Fuck that year

Fuck the holidays with no good cheer

Fuck impeachment, fuck Donald Trump

Fuck Republican enabler scum

Fuck Xi Jinping, Fuck Wuhan,

Fuck off Italy and fuck Iran

Fuck Trump for denying the virus we got

I said ‘Fuck Trump’ twice? Fuck, why not?

Fuck trying to analyze these rhymes

In this post I say ‘Fuck’ 93 times

Fuck people who gave the virus to kids

I’d say ‘Fuck Boris Johnson’ but the virus did

Fuck having to spend all day at home

Fuck wearing masks, fuck you if you don’t

Fuck closing buffets, fuck closing movies

Fuck closing bars where we can see floozies

Fuck it when any cops shoot a child

Why does ‘Fuck Tha Police’ never go out of style?

Fuck Twitter for posting their fraudulent Twits

Fuck Facebook cause it won’t let us show tits

Fuck, this year was worse than 2016

Fuck 2020’s no-kids Halloween

Fuck this election, Mitch McConnell sucks

Someone needs to kill his fuckin’ Horcrux

Fuck it if you think Biden’s win was a steal,

We’re not building a wall, and Q isn’t real

Fuck Trump again, you wanna ask why?
Cause he’s a talking hemorrhoid, really, FUCK THAT GUY!

Let’s hope this one is a much better year,

Fuck 2020, GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE!!!

Christmas Music That I Can Actually Stand, Continued

Here’s some more “holiday” songs I can think of that I actually like, though in some cases I had to dig. And on this week let me just say:

Happy Festivus!

The Pretenders, “2000 Miles”

If Die Hard is a Christmas movie cause it happens to be set at Christmas, this song is a Christmas song because it’s set at Christmas time. It wasn’t written for a Christmas album. “2000 Miles” was the last song on Learning to Crawl, released in 1984 after Pretenders guitarist James Honeyman-Scott and bassist Pete Farndon both died from drug abuse. Not only that, by this point, lead singer Chrissie Hynde had fallen in love with her mentor, Kinks singer Ray Davies, who broke up with her after they’d had a child. With the center of her band collapsed, Hynde had to get new personnel and from that point the Pretenders were that much more her personal property. Honeyman-Scott was actually the inspiration for this song. Learning to Crawl is a transitional album about taking stock of where you are in life, but unfortunately it’s also a transition between the Pretenders as a badass postpunk rock band and a relatively mainstream, sleepy pop group, although on “2000 Miles” that’s kind of the point.

Weird Al Yankovic, “Christmas at Ground Zero”

One of the few times that Al made a serious point with dark humor. Another good example is his Miley Cyrus parody, “Party in the CIA.”

Elton John, “Step Into Christmas”
A catchy song that unlike most Christmas standards hasn’t been played to death by radio and stores. From the golden days of Elton John, when he was still pretending to be straight but still wearing costumes that made Liberace look like a Trappist monk.

The Who, “Christmas”

Another Christmas song that’s not really about Christmas. It’s in the early section of the rock opera Tommy, in which the parents lament that their autistic son isn’t capable of recognizing the reason for the season, and as such, this is one of the few Christmas songs that’s actually about the Gospel: “How can he be saved/From the eternal grave?”

Eagles, “Please Come Home For Christmas”
This track (actually a cover of soul singer Charles Brown) endures better than a lot of other blues-rock stuff that has been played over the years, mainly because, as with Nat King Cole’s version of “The Christmas Song”, the various elements come together best on this particular version as opposed to the subsequent covers.

Run-DMC, “Christmas in Hollis”

Most of my musical taste runs to classic rock, aka “dad rock.” But this is a really cool song by rap pioneers Run-DMC. Of course, given what rap sounds like nowadays, Run-DMC might as well be dad rock.

Carol of the Bells – One of the “traditionals” that I actually like, especially as a choral.

Fear, “Fuck Christmas”

Dedicated to Melania Trump.

Whiny Fascism

Well, this Thanksgiving week, I was thankful that Viceroy Trump, who ran for re-election as president mainly to keep himself out of jail, is less likely to get help from the courts than ever, because believe it or not, Republican judges didn’t all buy the legal argument of “Biden votes aren’t legal, so just hand me the election, cause I’m Donald Trump, and I always get my way and I’ve never been told otherwise.” In a general overview, as of November 23, “at least” 38 cases have been filed nationwide and “at least” 26 have been denied, dismissed, settled or withdrawn, including the Pennsylvania case Trump v. Philadelphia Board of Elections, in which the plaintiffs argued that Republican observers were not given access to ballot tabulation, and after Trump’s attorney had to admit that Republicans had a “non-zero” number of vote observers, the judge asked them, “I’m sorry, then, what’s your problem?” And then over the weekend we had the hilarious news that after Team Trump paid $3 million for a recount in Wisconsin, it actually ended up giving Joe Biden more votes.

At this point, the attempt to “stop the steal” by performing an actual steal is done. Not just done: Well done with ketchup.

That of course doesn’t stop scaredy-cat liberals and centrists from worrying that the next fascist can look at what Trump did and make a more serious effort to take over. It’s not an invalid fear in itself. After all, in the short term, Trump is doing everything he can to make his sheep not only doubt the results of this election, but elections in general, turning them against anything that isn’t his brand of cult of personality. And more broadly, the level of support that Republicans got downballot and the fact that Trump did get more votes than last time indicates a real audience for a political movement that is not what we once called “conservative” but is actually reactionary.

But I’ve already gone over why Trump in particular and the Republicans in general are not a good comparison to the Nazis. “Given how many Americans either actively support “alt-right” racism or just don’t care, the real danger of Trump’s election was there was a chance that Trump could have done just as well as Hitler – if in fact he had done just as well as Hitler. Most Germans didn’t really care about (or hate) Jews as much as they cared about getting their jobs and their country’s prestige back. The comparison of the Trump Administration to the Nazi regime would hold up better if the Leader of the movement had even Adolf Hitler’s level of emotional maturity and common sense. Fortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case.”

I’ve often thought that it’s an insult to call Trump a Nazi. It’s an insult to the Nazis. At least Hitler could run an economic recovery for MORE than three years before starting a major catastrophe that killed everybody.

Fascism trades on a reputation for competence. This is of course exaggerated. Anybody who wants to bust the illusion of Nazi German efficiency just has to read William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. But again, they lasted six years before starting World War II. Mussolini actually lasted a lot longer than that, and Franco ended up dying of old age. The perception is that the fascists just get what they want by bypassing all the petty rituals of democratic government and debate, which is good if you’re a “traditionalist” or other reactionary who perceives a culture war that’s going against you. This disdain for liberalism and power-over-principle mindset is shared by Leninists, even if they have the radically opposite background and goals.

Maybe if there was somebody who had the more appealing features of Trumpism – being an “outsider” who actually WAS going to “drain the swamp”, control immigration and get our trade balances and domestic industry back in order – I might back that person. I have less confidence that that could happen though. Just as most of Trump’s “pro-life” cult are less concerned about prenatal and child care and actually saving innocent life than they are in using abortion as a club to demonstrate their self-righteousness, most of Trump’s appeal is based not on reason and policy, but emotion. Trump has such a huge bond with his audience because they’re the same needy, entitled, emotional personality type that he is. They knew damn well that Mexico wasn’t gonna pay for a wall; they just wanted to HEAR it. So the problem with Trumpism in practice is the same reason that Trumpism in theory isn’t going to work: Whatever genuine substance there might be in Trump’s stated agenda from a right-wing standpoint, the political success of Trump was not based on substance, but on appeal to dysfunction.

This is why despite my qualms about the Democrats and establishment Republicans, I never got on the Trump train, cause I’m Las Vegas, and he’s Atlantic City, and I’ve watched this guy be an obnoxious failure for literally decades.

If this is fascism, I like to call it “whiny fascism.”

The idea that Trump could have “used his powers for Good, not Evil” or that he was put in office to do anything other than be Trump, reminds me of what is probably the most hilarious single panel in a superhero comic ever. It’s when Spider-Man is in the Savage Land and has to confront Sauron, a mad scientist who’s used his genetic wizardry to turn himself into a humanoid pterodactyl. And he explains his mad scheme to turn the rest of the human race into dinosaurs like himself, and when Spider-Man realizes that this technology could work, he says “Wow, that’s amazing! But with your science, you could do something constructive! You could cure CANCER!” And Sauron says, “But I don’t WANT to cure cancer. I want to turn people into dinosaurs.”

Adam Serwer said that for the Trump Organization, “the cruelty is the point.” It would be just as accurate to say that the failure is the point. Trump won because he bonded with a certain spectrum of people who, despite their individual privilege or lack thereof, still cast themselves as put-upon victims because they belong to a cultural establishment that is currently unfashionable. And they wanted Trump to do what he’s done his entire life: fail upward, making life that much worse for everyone else, yet continue to get away with it. It was their revenge on a system that wouldn’t let them get away with individual failures. The fact that they are among the people being hurt by Trump’s incompetence doesn’t matter, because now their identity fusion is so complete that as long as Trump is winning, whatever he does is okay. However, Trump is no longer winning, and without immunity from prosecution, he may no longer be able to get away with his shit.

We can already see where the Republicans’ apparently invincible coalition is showing cracks. Trump, in his way, is determined to make sure that if he doesn’t have the White House, no one else will get to enjoy anything – including Republicans. His campaign to make The Church of Jesus Trump Latter-day Suckers doubt the validity of the election in the long-term is intended to undermine Joe Biden’s authority as President, but in the short term it really serves to undermine those voters’ faith in the election process at exactly the point that they need to get people out to the polls in Georgia to re-elect their two Republican Senators in a runoff, because if they both lose, the Democrats get an even 50 seats and Vice President Kamala Harris will break ties. Given Republican obstructionism, Democrats probably still won’t get to actually do much in the Senate, but that technical majority would mean that Democrats control important committees, and it means that Mitch McConnell would no longer be Majority Leader. And it would just be the SADDEST thing in the world to see Mitch McConnell cry.

And that’s all because a lot of people, not just Trump, can’t seem to understand that an election that did so well for Republicans down ballot did so badly for Trump. Trump himself can’t seem to understand it. Granted, there’s a truly AMAZING scope of stuff that he can’t understand, but it is confusing. There was a really good article about the Michigan recounts from Tim Alberta in Politico last week. When Trump called Michigan state Republican leaders to the White House, “As the meeting went on, it became apparent to some people in the room that more than anything, Trump had called his Michigan allies to Washington to get an honest assessment of what had happened there. He wanted to know if there was any pathway to victory. They told him there was not.

“I don’t get it,” the president said, venting confusion and frustration. “All these other Republicans, all over the country, they all win their races. And I’m the only guy that loses?”

But as I said last time, it’s actually fairly simple once it’s explained: The presidential election, even if it isn’t a straight national popularity poll, is the only federal election where everyone in the country votes in the same race. All the other races are statewide for Senate or per Congressional district. So even if the presidential votes are determined state-by-state, all the winning candidate has to do is get enough high-elector states. Last time, Hillary Clinton didn’t get those “firewall” states that Trump took, and Biden took them back. This is perfectly consistent with Trump winning Florida, Texas, and North Carolina, where other Republicans also won.

This goes along with the simple point that it was indeed possible for conservative voters to vote for their favorite Congresscritter down ticket but either vote Biden or not vote for president at all. Given the huge increase in votes for both Democrat and Republican presidential tickets, this split-ticket voting isn’t the only factor in the result, but it was a factor. In a local Pennsylvania news article several voters were interviewed and told reporters that it came down to trusting their local Congressman and not trusting Trump. “Jim Hagan, 68, of Chalfont, Bucks County, has a simple answer. His distaste for Trump did not extend to others in the GOP. ‘Although I voted for Mr. Trump in the previous election, I was very dissatisfied with his performance,” he said. “I think he completely dropped the ball on the COVID thing.’

“Hagan is a longtime Republican. He’s retired now, but his old job in the chemical industry allowed him to do a lot of international travel. Lately, he said, he has mourned what he sees as a loss of U.S. standing on the world stage. This cycle, Hagan said he voted for Biden and one other Democrat: Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who kept his seat.

“I like the way he does the job,” he said of Shapiro. “He’s very professional at it. He doesn’t seem to play partisan politics in the job, and I thought he was very proactive in doing the right thing for the people of Pennsylvania.” The mixed results were also reflective of the fact that in this election, Pennsylvania no longer uses the ‘straight-ticket’ voting option where a person can just choose the slate of candidates offered by their party all the way down. One political analyst said “returns in at least some counties showed higher turnout for the presidential race than down-ballot ones, which means some voters must have voted for president, but kept the rest of their ballot blank.”

Which indicates that on some scale the opposite problem may occur in some voting areas, where people are more enthused to turn out for the presidential contest than the other races. And that’s part of the problem Trump is creating for the cult of personality that used to be a mainstream political party. In the Politico article, Tim Alberta said: “(as mailed and early votes came in), two realities became inescapable to Michigan’s GOP elite. First, there was zero evidence to substantiate widespread voter fraud. Second, they could not afford to admit it publicly.” He cites the case of Ronna McDaniel, nee‘ Romney, who was an experienced and respected figure in Michigan politics, but “(that) changed after Trump’s 2016 victory. Tapped by the president-elect to take over the Republican National Committee—on the not-so-subtle condition that she remove “Romney” from her professional name—McDaniel morphed into an archetype of the Trump-era GOP sycophant. There was no lie too outlandish to parrot, no behavior too unbecoming to justify, no abuse of power too flagrant to enable. Longtime friends worried that McDaniel wasn’t merely humiliating herself publicly; she seemed to be changing in private. She was no longer coolly detached from the passions of politics. If anything, she was turning into a true MAGA believer.”

This has of course extended to the post-election period, where McDaniel told confidants she had no reason to suspect voter fraud but nevertheless felt obliged to enforce the Trump dogma: “If this sounds illogical, McDaniel’s thinking is actually quite linear. The RNC will vote in January on the position of chair. She is anxious to keep her job. It’s bad enough that despite an enormous investment of time and resources in Michigan, McDaniel was unable to deliver her home state for the president. If that might prove survivable, what would end McDaniel’s bid instantaneously is abandoning the flailing president in the final, desperate moments of his reelection campaign. No matter how obvious the outcome—to McDaniel, to the 168 members of the RNC, maybe even to Trump himself—any indication of surrender would be unforgivable.”

The article describes how one of the two Republicans on the Michigan election certification board voted with Democrats (while his Republican colleague abstained) and received actionable threats that required the involvement of the Michigan State Police. The former Republican state party head who recommended him to the board is now out of favor in the next race for the chairmanship because he had recommended the guy who refused to go along with Trump’s scheme. But this need to subordinate facts to political loyalty is not working, or not working with enough people, in the Great Lakes states Trump needed to turn the result, and it is actively working against the Republican Party in Georgia. “Driven by Trump’s insistence that Georgia’s elections are indelibly rife with fraud, conspiratorial MAGA figures are calling for a boycott of the two Senate runoff races, slated for Jan. 5, that will determine which party controls the upper chamber. Their reason: The two GOP candidates, Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, are not only insufficiently pro-Trump, they may be complicit in Georgia’s electoral fraud. It doesn’t matter that both candidates are essentially lock-step with Trump, or that there is no evidence of links to electoral malfeasance. On Twitter and its less-restrictive alternative Parler, Trump’s more hardline followers have linked the duo to the president’s favorite — and untrue — voter-fraud theories. Hashtags like #CrookedPerdue and #CrookedKelly are flying around. The two lawmakers’ Parler accounts are brimming with posts accusing them of being secret “liberal DemoRats.”

Because it doesn’t matter how conservative the two Senators are or how conservative the Secretary of State is or how conservative Governor Brian Kemp is, the Trumpnik definition of “conservative” is “I agree with everything Donald Trump says.” If he says the moon is made of green cheese, your only choice is to say it’s American or Swiss. And then of course he’s going to say it’s Monterey Jack, and you’ll be cast into the Abyss. You can’t keep up even if you wanted to. And I think a huge part of why the institutional Party is pushing back on Trump’s need to deny reality is that they’re getting sick of trying to keep up. At the same time, a large section of the Party IS still trying to do so, because they don’t see any other options.

This gets to a broader point that I don’t think the Left gets and that the Right is not willing to acknowledge. For any political movement to really get anywhere and really have popular support in this country, people have to imagine it as synonymous with mainstream opinion. The Right was a lot more successful in this regard under Reagan and even the Bushes than it is under Trump. In 1984, Reagan didn’t need to cheat or make the courts step in to hand him the Electoral College. He won 49 states the old-fashioned way. Even after Reagan-Bush, Bill Clinton felt obliged to say, “the era of Big Government is over.” If the Right is so obsessed with the Left dictating the terms of the “culture war”, and so obsessed with letting politicians pick their voters instead of the other way around, it is a tacit admission that they are losing the majority. The Republican Party of 1980 and 2000 may have been propped up by Religious Right reactionaries, but neither they nor the Beltway politicians would have come begging to Trump. Because they wouldn’t have needed to. Now they do.

Put directly, if Republicans and their ideas were still as popular as they were under Reagan or even under GW Bush, they wouldn’t need Trump. They had more mainstream support when they could still appeal to both the financial class and blue collar folks, but for several years they’ve been playing this game where they had to appeal to the most fire-breathing fanatics to win primaries then tack to moderates and the investor class to win general elections, and by the time the Tea Party turned into MAGA redcaps, they’d managed to catch on. In the meantime they’d managed to alienate most people who weren’t either redcaps or in the financial class, and the only reason this “Big Tent” still holds together is that Donald Trump is the only Republican who can seriously pose as both an elitist and a populist.

When the redcaps and the more sensible people had the same goals, everything was great. For them, at least. But now that the fortunes of elections have diverged for Donald Trump and his party as a whole, the Republican rank and file are now being asked to choose between the two. It seems as though Trump and his family are trying to head off the potential issue, with Trump announcing that he’s going to be campaigning in Georgia for the Senators, but it’s still causing damage. And the fact that he let things get to this point just confirms that he sees the Party as something that serves his interests and not vice versa. Which may be another reason some Republicans are no longer that supportive.

It gets back to that old Vox website question of whether Trump is a fascist. And while at the time, and even after a 2020 update, the expert consensus was that while Trump is an actual danger to democracy, he can’t be called a fascist because fascism is a collectivist movement and Trump is too much of an individualist to create such a movement. That may seem like little distinction given how many individuals are willing to subsume themselves in Trump’s cult of personality. But to the extent that Mussolini and other Fascists did explain their philosophy, it is an explicitly collectivist movement which foremost holds that one must have loyalty to something greater than oneself, namely the State. Trump clearly doesn’t have loyalty to his own party, let alone America. Reagan may have given us the 11th Commandment, but the First Commandment of the Trumpnik is “I am the LORD thy Trump, thou shalt have no principles above me.”

Howling emotionalism, a perpetual sense of victimhood and a need to pick on the weak may be prerequisites of fascism, but they are not traits exclusive to fascism, and they are certainly not the only defining traits, especially if you want your fascist paradise to actually succeed. The other thing the movement needs, again, is actual popular support. Republicans used to have that, but now that they don’t, the only way the sane people can have a national platform is to attach to Trump’s cult of personality. But that means becoming the Party of Trump, and it’s pretty clear that a party that consists ONLY of Trump and his priorities isn’t going to get anywhere with the rest of the country, especially when so many people have clearly decided they can have the Party without Trump.

All of which means that Trump, or even “Trumpism”, to the extent that such a thing exists, is an unlikely vehicle for the success of American Fascism. For one thing, the fact that events have shown fascists what to do and what not to do in pushing authoritarianism now means that more liberal people also know what methods could be used to undermine democracy, and they will now have the opportunity to be on guard.

But that assumes they will take advantage of that knowledge. Ay, there’s the rub.

For all our talk about how America has a written constitution, as opposed to an “unwritten constitution” of precedents like Britain, the real danger that Trump represents wasn’t his approach to the election, because everyone knew he was gonna stamp his little feet and whine if he didn’t get his way. The danger was how much of the apparently sacred system of government was really just a set of “norms” and when approached by a thug with no norms or sense of the sacred, all our written laws are useless. Because the “norm” is that nobody enforces them. We have never dared to have a political apparatchik defy a congressional subpoena – until now. We have never had a president since Nixon refuse to release his tax returns – until now. We have never had a president refuse to put his business assets in trust – until now. We have never had a president flout the laws against nepotism that were put in place after JFK made Bobby Kennedy Attorney General, because the fact that the laws existed meant no president wanted to take the political risk for flouting them. But now we know there is no political risk.

Even before Trump, the “guardrails of democracy”, such as the Congress and the media, have been far too deferential to the president and far too indulgent of the idea that the president can do whatever he wants because he’s the president. And if my liberal friends would tell me that Obama relied on executive orders precisely because of Republican obstructionism, that just reveals the problem. This government, like the Roman Republic it was based on, has no counter to a squabbling and dysfunctional Senate other than to give the executive officer more and more power. This is a nation of men, not laws.

That is the real problem. That always HAS been the real problem.

The fact that the closest thing we’ve had to a fascist leader in American history is a whiny little child just stands to reason, because the President of the United States, Trump notwithstanding, is by far the most spoiled head of government in the developed world. We let the president do more things than any other head of government would do. And while Donald Trump may not actually like to work, and according to some sources was shocked that he did get elected, once he did become president, that status fused to his identity the same way the redcaps fused to their hero, because if the premise of the modern presidency is “the president can do whatever he wants, because he’s the president”, this status became the most objective rationale for Trump’s existing desire to believe “Donald Trump can do anything he wants, because he’s Donald Trump.”

And in terms of that old cliche, “government should be run like a business”, well, most major companies these days are run as corporations, which means they are collective entities, not the private concern of one individual, and are technically responsible to shareholders. Trump has never run a corporation. All of his businesses are family outfits. So to speak. If one were to apply the analogy of a corporation, if Trump is the CEO, he technically has a Board (Congress) and shareholders (voters), but they don’t hold him accountable. Of course, ultimately “shareholders” did hold him accountable, but only after the Republican Senate directly abnegated its responsibility to do so under impeachment. But that’s what happens when half of the Board members think the CEO is their boss and not an officer subject to their review.

Needless to say, you do not want a government that caters to the mindset of a Donald Trump and is run the way Donald Trump runs his businesses, but that is exactly what we have. It’s just that nobody noticed it was a problem before because up until now the President was not to the government what a malignant tumor is to the body, only without the brains.

Of course, given that Democrats themselves are loath to give up the premise of an unaccountable president when it’s THEIR guy in charge, the idea of limiting the office may seem a bit much. But then, when impeachment happened, a lot of them discovered that even such laws as there are have no provision for enforcement. That needs to change. We need to make sure that Congress has real subpoena power, meaning the legal authority to enforce it. We need to lift this bullshit unwritten privilege that the FBI isn’t allowed to indict a sitting president, as if the most powerful person in the world with access to the most sensitive information should be the only American who’s not under surveillance. We need to STOP SENDING THE MILITARY TO WARS WITHOUT A DECLARATION OF WAR. In other words, we need the rest of the government to do its job and not let the President do everything.

And given that Democrats will be the Senate minority or only technically a majority, I don’t count on them getting such reforms through the Senate in the next few years. Unless of course, Texas finally goes blue along with Georgia and that whole “Southern Strategy” the Republican Party has been based on for the last fifty years just crumbles.

It ought to be a really simple lesson, but apparently it isn’t. So briefly: If you don’t want the President to be a fascist dictator, then don’t let him have that level of power, even when he’s on your team. And if you don’t want an all-powerful government destroying your freedom and rights, then don’t let the government become all-powerful.

Another Such Victory And We Are Lost

Some of you may already be familiar with the term “Pyrrhic victory,” but in case you’re not: In the days of Antiquity, when the Roman Republic was starting to take over the Italian peninsula, the Italian city of Tarentum (modern Taranto) recruited Pyrrhus, a king of western Greece, to help them resist the Romans. In the Pyrrhic War (280-275 BC) Pyrrhus’ skills as a general led him to victories over the Romans, but the losses were costly. And while his mercenaries were in limited supply, the Romans had a vastly greater manpower reserve. Eventually, at the Battle of Asculum, Pyrrhus realized that. When one of his people told him they had won the day, Pyrrhus looked at the battlefield and said words to the effect of “another such victory and we are lost.”

Well, here we are.

We now have probably the third-worst possible result of Election 2020: The worst, of course, would be a clear Trump victory that would also secure the Senate. Although no one had expected Democrats to lose the House, at least until this week. Either way, Trump and Mitch (the Bitch) McConnell would have gotten to do whatever they wanted and Nancy Pelosi would be just as powerless to stop them as she is now.

The second worst result would have been if the Democrats’ famous “blue wave” had taken the Senate and expanded the House lead but the Electoral College still secured the presidency for Trump. Then Trump would still retain his toxic influence over the government and the culture, but then Pelosi and Chuck Schumer would be able to hem him in and Mitch wouldn’t be able to protect him. Not only that, Trump would still get the blame for every rotten thing in the government.

What we have coming up is the third worst possible result where the “blue wave” smacked up against the reality of Republican base support, just as it did in 2018 Senate races, but Joe Biden still gets the Electoral College. He’s still got to deal with McConnell, and he’s not going to get much if anything done through the Senate. And all the while, in his next two years, Republicans will be doing their damndest to keep this country bass-ackward and then blame Biden as the figurehead of the Democrats, and quite likely take back the House in the 2022 midterms as a result. And that will set up a humongous effort for Republicans to take back the whole thing in 2024.

And while Trump’s toxic influence would still be removed from institutional authority, unless he’s immediately indicted and effectively prosecuted by the State of New York, he will run again and quite likely win. And if he can’t, you know Donald Trump Jr. is waiting in the wings to wave the bloody shirt for dear old Dad. And I’ve seen Don. He’s not senile, he’s slightly less idiotic than his Dad, and he’s actually a decent public speaker.

You know why I say Democrats are the people who couldn’t get laid in a whorehouse? This is why.

Let me first go over the good news: The Biden plan DID work.

It was expected that with the coronavirus, it would be harder to vote in person (almost as if Trump let the virus run wild during an election year so it’d be harder to vote against him), and it was expected that as a result, Democrats would have to concentrate on mail-in voting while Trump implicitly and explicitly told his people to vote in person, even though many affluent Republicans (like Trump himself) had normally voted by mail for convenience. This set up a “red mirage” that caused Election Night to show a huge lead for Trump in critical states like Pennsylvania. But since mail-in voting was a thing even before coronavirus, Trump couldn’t declare that mail-in ballots were “cheating” and therefore couldn’t stop them from coming in. And much to his apparent surprise, most of them weren’t for Trump. And that’s how Biden won Pennsylvania, created run-offs in Georgia, and maintained his lead in Arizona and Nevada.

In short, Trump played himself.

The plan to rely on changing demographics to pull away red states ultimately did not work in Florida, Texas or North Carolina. But it is sorta working in Georgia, and it definitely worked in Arizona.

This doesn’t change the fact that it has not yet worked for Florida, Texas and North Carolina, and it may not work as the Democrats expect it to, partially because a lot of brown and black people “of color” do not assume themselves to be Democrats just because, while a lot of white people DO assume themselves to be Republicans just because.

A libertarian (and black) Facebook friend turned me on to this article by Umair Haque: “America’s Problem is That White People Want It to Be a Failed State“. Example quote: “White Americans are the rich world’s most hostile, ignorant, violent, cruel, and selfish social group — by a very long way. “Voting conservative” after all doesn’t mean nearly the same thing in Europe or Canada. There, even conservative parties agree on the basics — people should have healthcare, education, retirement, that the only point of the public purse isn’t endless war and death machines. Conservatism in America is off the charts, and so “voting” that way carries a very different meaning. It means that White Americans are the rich world’s most regressive, ignorant, and self-destructive political bloc — by such a long way that they might as well not be in the rich world at all.

“I don’t mean any of that as an insult, by the way. I mean it objectively, literally, factually. You’d think that by now White Americans would have figured out that voting against their own standards of living ever rising just because it meant black and brown people would have public goods too was…imbecilic. Especially watching Europe and Canada rise and prosper. They’ve had more than half a century to figure that out. But they still haven’t. What else do you call the inability to learn from the world and history but…ignorance?”

Now, Haque is a brilliant writer, but I often find him not only anti-American but overly despairing. But again, he is a brilliant writer. And as much as I wanted to disagree with the premise, the harder and harder it was to refute. How can I disagree with it when we’ve got almost a quarter million dead already from Trump Virus because he personally has told so many people that a $3 mask is possessed by evil spirits?

How can I disagree with it when at least three times in the last two weeks of the campaign, Trump bussed in supporters to watch him talk in front of Air Force One and then didn’t pay for the buses to take them back to their cars, literally leaving them out in the cold? Those people turned around AND VOTED FOR TRUMP!

These are the people who went out after the election to parrot the line “STOP THE COUNT” in Arizona, where Trump needed to count all the votes to still have a chance!

It’s not just a case of not wanting black and brown people to have public goods. Maybe it was once, but it’s gotten worse than that. These people have internalized their own bass-ackwardness to the point that they want to inflict it on the rest of the country, if not the world. Like I said in the first campaign: “When these people reject any argument against Trump, what some of them are saying, consciously or not, is, “My life sucks, and it will never get any better. I am too old and too poor to retrain for a decent-paying job, assuming there are any left in my town. And the only power I still have is the chance to force everyone else to live in the existential hellhole that I am now trapped in for the rest of my life.”

The fact that some Americans are trapped in an existential hellhole because of deliberate political strategies, some of which they voted for, isn’t the point anymore. Because now that’s their identity. And identity is everything.

It doesn’t matter that both Biden and Obama are both a lot closer to Eisenhower or even Nixon Republicans than anybody in the Republican Party today, all “conservatives” care about is stopping the guy who they’re told is a socialist.

“What does ‘socialist’ mean to you?”
“Someone who wants to control our economy! Someone who wants to control our schools! Someone who wants to take our guns! Someone who praises Communist dictators! Someone who only wants THEIR party controlling things! Someone who says that anybody who disagrees with him ought to be jailed or beaten up!”

“Oh, so like Trump?”

“Yes! Wh- NO!”

“Socialism” isn’t the point here. Geez Louise, the first retirement system in Germany was created by Bismarck. The point is that you’re acting on tribalism and negative partisanship, and your favorite demagogue knows which buttons to push to make you act like good little robots, and you end up endorsing all the things you say you oppose, because all he had to do was switch the labels.

This is illustrated by a pretty good article by Alex Pareene in The New Republic, where it’s pointed out that in some respects it doesn’t really matter if Joe Biden is too left-wing for the country or not left-wing enough for “progressives.” “Huge percentages of voters support government-sponsored health care, more state intervention in the economy, and more government support for clean energy. We have, of course, just learned some important lessons about the limitations of public opinion polling, but these majorities are too large to be completely dismissed as mere polling errors. That Democrats cannot translate robust support for their central policies into consistent electoral victories suggests that something is amiss in the democratic accountability feedback loop. It is of course true that on many of these issues, like health care, the Democratic Party firmly rejected the left’s popular proposals in favor of a confusing and diluted alternative. That is what Democrats nearly always do. Perhaps that is what the electorate punishes them for. But that same electorate also regularly elects Republicans, who are very vocally opposed to all of those fine, popular ideas.”

The author goes on: “Faced with this dilemma, some commentators have insisted that Democrats just need to shut up about everything else in their great big platform and talk solely of dollars and cents. There is a liberal version of this argument, articulated by people like Mark Lilla: that Democrats should abandon their commitment to “identity” issues. And there is a left-wing version of this argument (caricatured by its opponents as “class reductionism”): that leftist politicians should focus on material concerns to the exclusion of all else.

“But what if the argument itself is moot? What if it barely matters what Democrats “talk about” or “campaign on”? What if this is less a problem of political messaging or positioning than of political education, information access, and ubiquitous propaganda? In other words, if the Democrats actively try to abandon “identity issues,” will anyone in this political environment actually stop associating them with “identity issues”? If they ran a strictly class-focused campaign, how many marginal voters would hear their messaging and believe it?

“It seems possible, in other words, that voters no longer believe that the Democratic Party represents a coalition that includes the working class, and that even if the party puts forward Democratic candidates who support pro-worker policy, it simply will not suffice to reach or convince voters.

“This is not uncharted territory. Writing, in 1979, about the United Kingdom’s “swing to the Right,” the sociologist Stuart Hall argued that it could be explained (in part) by the fact that, once in power, social democratic parties became parties of the state, rather than parties of labor, as the state intervened to put the “national interest” above the “class struggle,” disciplining labor on behalf of the markets.

“In the absence of any fuller mobilization of democratic initiatives,” he wrote, “the state is increasingly encountered and experienced by ordinary working people as, indeed, not a beneficiary but a powerful, bureaucratic imposition. And this ‘experience’ is not misguided since, in its effective operations with respect to the popular classes, the state is less and less present as a welfare institution and more and more present as the state of ‘state monopoly capital.’”

“The Democratic Party, unlike most of its left-of-center brethren in the developed world, has never been a true labor party, but it seems plausible that many voters view it as a party representing a state that never helps them, even as they, personally, practically beg for a large and powerful state that would step in to improve their lives.

“The question Democrats now face is whether saying they will empower the state to improve people’s lives will actually work on anyone.”

This goes to a point that I’ve frequently made. One of the reasons that Republicans can succeed with an apparently counterintuitive strategy to not broaden their base is that this means they only have to appeal to a certain group of people, whereas the Democrats have to simultaneously be the party of woke socialists and the default NotRepublican party for everybody else, including a lot of us who might be Republican if they hadn’t gone insane. In that environment, branding, negative partisanship and team identity are everything. And just as left-wing “parties of labor” eventually become “parties of the state” when they become successful, the formerly Hamiltonian Republican Party switched to a Jeffersonian, anti-Big Government stance with Democratic hegemony, and in their crusade against the other party, they’ve become against any government initiative at all, even as they cling to the perks of government all the more desperately.

And yet it works on precisely the biggest victims of government neglect, precisely because the party that identifies with government is in turn identified with all the areas in which Big Government has failed “flyover country”, the inner cities and everywhere else. And in turn, the party that is conspicuously anti-government and is very transparent about seizing power only to raid the community piggy bank still gets support because at this point, the victims of government expect to get screwed, they just want THEIR team to be the ones screwing them.

It’s a lot like Russia, which is of course one of Trumpworld’s main cultural role models.

Which is where you have the mainstream Democrats like Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger (D.-Va) saying “don’t say socialism ever again” and socialist Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez saying “I’ve been begging the party to let me help them for two years. That’s also the damn thing of it. I’ve been trying to help. Before the election, I offered to help every single swing district Democrat with their operation. And every single one of them, but five, refused my help. And all five of the vulnerable or swing district people that I helped secured victory or are on a path to secure victory. And every single one that rejected my help is losing. And now they’re blaming us for their loss” and – bear with me here – they’re BOTH right.

Remember my axiom: “It is possible for two different things to be true at the same time.”

AOC also said in her New York Times interview: “I think it’s going to be really important how the party deals with this (loss of House races) internally, and whether the party is going to be honest about doing a real post-mortem and actually digging into why they lost. Because before we even had any data yet in a lot of these races, there was already finger-pointing that this was progressives’ fault and that this was the fault of the Movement for Black Lives.

“I’ve already started looking into the actual functioning of these campaigns. And the thing is, I’ve been unseating Democrats for two years. I have been defeating Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee-run campaigns for two years. That’s how I got to Congress. That’s how we elected Ayanna Pressley. That’s how Jamaal Bowman won. That’s how Cori Bush won. And so we know about extreme vulnerabilities in how Democrats run campaigns. … And I’ve looked through a lot of these campaigns that lost, and the fact of the matter is if you’re not spending $200,000 on Facebook with fund-raising, persuasion, volunteer recruitment, get-out-the-vote the week before the election, you are not firing on all cylinders. And not a single one of these campaigns were firing on all cylinders.”

The reporter asked her, “So what are you saying: Investment in digital advertising and canvassing are a greater reason moderate Democrats lost than any progressive policy? ” Ocasio-Cortez responded: “These folks are pointing toward Republican messaging that they feel killed them, right? But why were you so vulnerable to that attack?

“If you’re not door-knocking, if you’re not on the internet, if your main points of reliance are TV and mail, then you’re not running a campaign on all cylinders. I just don’t see how anyone could be making ideological claims when they didn’t run a full-fledged campaign.

“Our party isn’t even online, not in a real way that exhibits competence. And so, yeah, they were vulnerable to these messages, because they weren’t even on the mediums where these messages were most potent. Sure, you can point to the message, but they were also sitting ducks. They were sitting ducks.

“There’s a reason Barack Obama built an entire national campaign apparatus outside of the Democratic National Committee. And there’s a reason that when he didn’t activate or continue that, we lost House majorities. Because the party — in and of itself — does not have the core competencies, and no amount of money is going to fix that.”

The moderate centrists are right in saying that if the Democrats are tied to socialism, they’re doomed. The socialists like AOC are right in that ‘socialism’ isn’t even the fucking point. Her core question: “These folks are pointing toward Republican messaging that they feel killed them, right? But why were you so vulnerable to that attack?”
Because Democrats, for some silly reason, still focus on policies, and Republicans focus on branding. And if there’s one thing that Trump is genuinely good at, it’s branding.
We used to think that nobody in America could go along with fascist sympathizers, “white nationalists” and the rest of the human fungi, but look at us now. All they had to do was have the right branding. All that took was the same skill set it took to convince people that a six-time bankrupt career swindler was a financial and administrative genius who “tells it like it is” cause he played a billionaire on NBC.

Whereas a lot of “radical socialist” ideas like a $15 minimum wage have support in a lot of states, including Florida, where Democrats lost the presidential election. Just as “radical” ideas like gay marriage have widespread support now, and (for the moment) legal status, just as interracial marriage used to be some abominable Communist plot to corrupt our pure Christian bloodlines. Mind, those things are still horrible Communist plots where some people are concerned, but they’re no longer literally unthinkable.

The alternative-to-being-right doesn’t actually CALL itself fascist, of course. They wrap themselves in “traditional values”, “making America great again” and all the other stuff that no one should object to. The Left still hasn’t figured out how to make what they want synonymous with what the country as a whole wants, in the way that Reagan or even Trump did.

And I think a large part of that is that the left spectrum, especially the institutionalists who still run the Democratic Party, have no better definition of “socialism” than the libertarians have of “libertarianism.”

And just as (L)ibertarians have not done enough to dispel the public perception of libertarianism as “Fuck You, I’ve Got Mine” and the “conservatives” are actually promoting a perception of their politics as making everyone else suffer for the sake of their greed and sadism, leftists haven’t figured out that (especially in this duopoly system where all politics has to be filtered through mainstream parties), they can’t sell “socialism” as though it meant the same thing to the rest of the country that it seems to mean to them. I can go on Facebook until I’m figuratively blue in the face and tell people that libertarianism is not a conservative plot to turn the country into serfs and kill Roe vs. Wade so that women will be forced to give birth so that Charles Koch can go to the maternity wards and eat the babies, but when a lot of the people I’m debating are invested in promoting that assertion, I’m going uphill. But those people don’t understand that the rest of the country has come to think of “socialism” as synonymous with Leninism, and when they try to define it as a social democratic movement (which incidentally is NOT socialism, in that leftist parties in the EU don’t intend to destroy the capitalist system that they need to finance their public funding), they’re going uphill versus the rest of the country. It certainly doesn’t help that a lot of these guys (like Bernie Sanders) DO praise Communist dictators and DO want to take our guns. Not to mention that, again, Democrats seem at odds themselves as to what they really mean by these terms. And if you haven’t defined your terms, the enemy will define them for you.

Now, am I saying that branding is all there is? That Americans, even ones with brains, don’t engage with political issues beyond the surface and only make political decisions in shorthand? That you can get some of them to eagerly devour wet camel shit if you’ve convinced them that that is consistent with their existing programming?

Well, I’M not saying that, I’m saying that’s what the election results are telling me. How else could Trump and his party have gotten as many votes as they did when people knew that a Trump victory would mean rewarding the government that allowed coronavirus to spread, and would continue a policy that would mean no progress and no national policy on the virus, causing continued death and the continued retardation of our economic recovery as a direct result?

Democrats from FDR on did take ideas that their opponents called radical socialism and they did make them part of mainstream American thinking. It’s not impossible. It’s just not possible with the current mindset. What that party needs is someone who can take supposedly radical ideas that are in fact being entertained by voters and make them acceptable to the country at large.

Which is why in retrospect Joe Biden, the old-school guy who is accommodating the New Left (or being used by it, depending on your viewpoint) really was the best candidate the Democrats could’ve had this year. I think he is to the Democrats what Tom Brady is to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers: Way past his prime, and his team really doesn’t have what it takes to get where they ultimately want to go, but they’re still a lot better off with him than they were four years ago.

The scare among the Trumpnik cult is that Biden is just a tool or a stalking horse for the radicals and that they needed Republicans to act as a counter to that, blanking out the point that Trump, the alleged outsider, was the stalking horse for radical anti-democrats and reactionaries to sell something that could not be sold otherwise. There was a Markos Moulitsas/Daily Kos article on Monday: “There’s nothing “shy” about these people or their support for Trump, yet pollsters aren’t catching them. They turn out for Trump, but they didn’t turn out for Republicans in 2017, 2018, or 2019. Remember, last year Democrats picked up governorships in the blood-red states of Louisiana and Kentucky. … (Yet Republicans stormed back this year) because Trump was at the top of the ballot. So again, who are these people who only vote for Trump, otherwise ignore the Republican Party (despite Trump’s pleading), and don’t talk to pollsters? The hidden deplorables aren’t Republican. They aren’t even conservative. They’re apolitical, otherwise ignoring politics, because their lives legitimately suck.”

Which is exactly what I’m saying. The “Trump voter” isn’t necessarily a Republican voter. The reason polls turned out so well for Democrats in 2018 and the Kentucky election and turned out so badly this time was that the Trump voters didn’t turn out then and did turn out this time. Even when they have brains, they don’t engage with issues except on the surface, and even if they are in the abstract against corruption and two-party shenanigans and for ‘progressive’ ideas, they end up endorsing the most corrupt and regressive candidate cause they’ve bought into his spiel.

By the same token, a lot of the left spectrum who “shoulda” turned out for Hillary Clinton last time and didn’t, did turn out this time for Biden, just as they turned out for Obama, because each of these people is a symbol of what their parties represent, and people preferred Trump to the Democrat last time (despite her superior record and policies) because she represented something negative, and people voted in Biden over Trump this time, because Trump’s negatives increased and Biden represented more positives than negatives.

Remember, however much liberals whine about how un-democratic the Electoral College is, it IS the only federal election in which every voter in the country has a say. Every other election race is per House district, or per state. It’s just that the Electoral College filters results state-by-state instead of as a direct national popularity poll. So as you look state-by-state, a lot of voters decided they preferred their Republican Senator or didn’t want their Democratic Representative. But when you look at the Electoral College, when you combine the 100 Electors assigned for the Senate to all the votes for House districts, you get a national consensus where Joe Biden, like Trump in 2016, got at least 306 Electors because the high-Elector states went for Biden, including Arizona and Georgia, which could have gone either way.

It’s almost as if the public at large can’t stand either party and didn’t want either one of them to win, even knowing that one of them was going to win the White House.

So: Woke socialism is NOT popular. Being anti-Trump just for the sake of being anti-Trump is not popular. But neither is Trump ultimately that popular. Yet politics aside, we need to protect the Constitution and human rights. And there does seem to be some grass-roots sentiment for reducing government control over our personal choices, including the right to marry.

Hey- anybody know of a non-leftist political party that believes in liberty and human rights?

You’re Fired

So, apparently the election was called for Joe Biden. I say “apparently” because it’s 2020, and you never know.

There will be another time to go over how bad things are for the Democrats. And I will. But for now, let us reflect on exactly how deeply, deeply Trump has LOST.

Indeed, while Trump got more votes than ever before, Joe Biden got more votes than even Obama. And that underscores the point that however badly the Democrats got shellacked in downballot races they “shoulda” won, the fact that Trump still lost as clearly and decisively as he did indicates that Trump might actually have under-performed the rest of his Party.

If nothing else, when the entire Goddamn world celebrates your loss of an election like it was the last scene in Return of the Jedi Special Edition, you really need to take stock of how much people fucking hate you.

And yet, our Boy King still went out a couple days after Election Day to say, “If you count only the LEGAL votes, I won easily.” He’s become less and less prone to be on camera since then and yet more and more prone to whine on Twitter. “Pennsylvania, they’re busin’ in ILLEGALS from Ethiopia, or Somalia, or wherever Ihlan Omar’s from! It’s not Election Day anymore! You can’t count votes after Election Day! That’s ILLEGAL! MOMMY! They’re pickin’ on me! It’s vewy UNFAIH!! Why’re they still countin’ votes?? You can’t just say the guy who got more votes won a state! Whaddya think this is, a DEMOCWACY?!? They’re tryin’ to STEAL the ewection fwom me! This ewection is WIGGED!!

“Wigged, I’m tellin’ ya! WIGGED!!!”

Somebody on Quora had the stones to ask, after the Democratic down-ballot humiliation and Trump’s apparent victory Tuesday, whether the media “were finally going to start telling the truth.” And then Trump had his little temper tantrum on Thursday, which MSDNC covered only briefly and which various news organizations refused to directly quote. CNN did play it in its entirely, but it was immediately ridiculed by various anchors, most famously Anderson Cooper, who said, “That is the president of the United States. That is the most powerful person in the world, and we see him like an obese turtle on his back flailing in the hot sun, realizing his time is over, but he just hasn’t accepted it and he wants to take everybody down with him, including this country.”

That IS the media finally telling the truth, or at least giving an honest opinion. The lie was when various media shills gave Trump free media and uncritical exposure that they never would have given Jill Stein or Gary Johnson, and after they helped get him elected by treating him as a serious politician, they continued to lie by giving him the decorum expected of a president, as though he were a rational adult and not a babbling ape-boy screaming to the Moon that he is the Lord of All Creation. And once there was even the possibility that that would no longer be the case anymore, they no longer felt the need to pretend, and there was no point in covering a press conference that was less a genuine news event and more of a psychotic break captured on television.

“I believe that what Gus is trying to tell you, Mr. President, is that you can suck it.”

Not to say that Trump won’t try to throw out every roadblock, but the longer he insists on delaying the obvious, the less he will look like George W. Bush in 2000 and more like Gore-Lieberman 2000. aka “Sore-Loserman 2000.” And not to say that Trump won’t pull every nasty little trick in the book, like getting his pet state legislatures to draft a whole set of partisan electors for him and then have his handpicked Supreme Court tell us it’s all as kosher as bacon-wrapped shrimp, but the more clearly and repeatedly the public makes clear to him how happy we are even to have the chance to be RID of him, the more he and his goons will fear the clear will of the majority. To defy that, even with the Supreme Court, is to delegitimize the entire government, and will require relying on the military to maintain power, which is not such a good bet, especially now that they know what Trump thinks of them.

Plus which, the real reason I think that’s not gonna happen is because Trump is the laziest fucking slug on Earth to be mislabeled Homo sapiens. To go against a wave of public opinion that is now turning into a tsunami would require Trump to keep martial law up all the time. It would require him to be on guard all the time. He’d have to spend all of his golf time just keeping a lid on things. But that would require work. It’s just too HARD. The thing is, whether liberals liked Trump or not, and whether they liked the Electoral College or not, they put up with Trump and his bullshit because those were the rules, and unlike Republicans, they actually like rules. The only reason they put up with Trump under minority rule was to protect the Electoral College and the rest of the Constitution. You game the rules of the Electoral College after the election, you invalidate the Electoral College, which is the only reason you were president in the first place. If you had majority support, you wouldn’t need the Electoral College. If you don’t even have that… You. Are. FUCKED.

As in, six-foot cactus, straight up ass, attached to an electric blender, set on “PUREE.”

Look, Trump: I never liked you. But… no, there is no ‘but.’ I never liked you. For the life of me, I will never understand how such an obvious phony got such a following from the same ‘flyover country’ that New York elites like you so openly disdain. The fact that they worship you so deeply just because you turn around and tell them what they want to hear indicates that such disdain is justified. Such support as you have reflects just as much on them as you, as the continued success of your party in this election indicates that they have embraced truly destructive values.

At the same time, the fact that you had such support, and that no Democratic hoax could dislodge Susan Collins, Mitch McConnell or Lindsay Graham indicates that even some Republicans realized that however much they liked the idea of Trump, they couldn’t deal with the reality. They seem happy to have a government where people like them are making the real decisions, as they did with the last Supreme Court appointments… they just don’t want YOU leading it.

You are more senile than Reagan, more crooked than Nixon, more incompetent than Carter, more vulgar than LBJ, and more imperious than FDR. You are certainly the worst president in American history since James Buchanan, who presided over the start of the Civil War. And of course you still have about three months to top him. Not only are you the worst president, you are the only statesman on Earth who combines in one person the gluttony of Augustus Gloop, the vanity of Violet Beauregard, the sheer brattiness of Veruca Salt, and the media obsession of Mike Teavee. And so, in the immortal words of Willy Wonka:

Good DAY, Sir!