Tag: coronavirus

“No advocate of reason can claim the right to establish HIS version of a good society, if such society includes the initiation of force against dissenters in ANY issue. No advocate of the free mind can claim the right to force the minds of others.”
-Ayn Rand, Letters of Ayn Rand

One will note that I called my last post “The Once And Future Libertarian” without doing much to advocate for libertarianism or the Libertarian Party. That’s because, having gone over what’s still wrong with the duopoly, and why simply assimilating into the Democrat Collective is not sufficient to solve this country’s problems, it requires a bit more analysis as to why going libertarian is a good idea. Especially these days.

Since one of the major issues in the news the last few weeks is Texas. What specifically about Texas? The whole thing. First, while the winter storms of February were intense for most of the country, it was only in Texas that the weather caused both power and water to go out across the state, since lack of power also caused the systems heating (and cleaning) the water lines to freeze. And that, it turned out, was because a, the Texas power grid is separate from the rest of the area around it, and b, the state didn’t protect that power grid by winterizing the equipment. And of course, now people are getting charged four-digit power bills for that period, because Texas utilities were allowed to charge customers “what the market will bear.” One company, Griddy, had actually warned customers to leave. The first time I’d heard about that story, I thought they were telling people to leave Texas, which is good advice regardless of the weather.

And then on March 2 Texas Governor Greg Abbott (three guesses as to what party he is, and the first three don’t count) publicly announced, as though it were something to be proud of, that he was lifting all COVID-19 restrictions in the state “100 percent.” This was exactly at the point that vaccines were about to roll out, but before the sectors of labor most likely to require contact with the public, such as medical and service workers, were vaccinated. Which sort of defeats the purpose of acting like the pandemic is over.

How is a right-winger, especially a libertarian, going to say that lack of restrictions is necessarily going to lead to good results? You can’t. Which leads to the second lesson I want to impart to the Right. To recall, “The first thing that right-wingers (Republican or Libertarian) have to learn is that the Left is going to call them a bunch of heartless ogres and witches whether they earn the reputation or not. Which is what makes it imperative NOT to earn it.” The second lesson is that the reason we have as much government as we do is that someone saw a need for it, as I’ve also said before. Since the kind of disaster that we’ve seen in Texas can happen if you just let the private sector do as it will, this makes it possible to enact heavy regulations under the impression they’re actually going to help people. I say, “under the impression” because that’s not usually how it works, and that’s really not the reason we have the bureaucracy that we do. In fact, much of the regulation we have is specifically intended to protect the businesses ostensibly being regulated, and is written on their behalf, sometimes actually BY them.

Believe it or not, the best explanation of this point I’ve seen is from leftists on social media.

Here is an example of what would happen if we treated the local pizzeria like we treated health care: https://www.facebook.com/james.gillen.969/posts/3737875906261472?notif_id=1614799095747641&notif_t=feedback_reaction_generic&ref=notif

And then there’s this: (https://www.facebook.com/kirstin.hamaker/posts/3784372801624524)

I wasn’t able to see anything else referring to this tweetstorm on my Internet searches, so I just posted the link.

Even if you see the need for regulations of the dairy industry (in this case) or the corn syrup industry, or whatever, the regulations we have are designed not only to benefit giant industries but to corner out smaller farmers and producers that not only would do things in a more capitalist, competitive way, but would also behave more ethically and follow the regulations and practices that the liberals and socialists actually want.

And in regard to the particular crisis, before Greg Abbott was Texas Governor, he was the state Attorney General, and had taken the (Republican) state government’s position against the Obama Administration that it should be able to operate its power grid independently and not have to enact the winterization procedures that everybody else did. Now he’s calling on the utilities to do so, even as politicians are telling us we need to rescue the people stuck with bills from unregulated companies. The Texas Tribune article: “Lawmakers have demanded that the utility commission roll back its decision to allow the huge rate increases, or suggested cobbling together some package of emergency waivers or relief money to buffer Texans’ from the high bills.

“We cannot allow someone to exploit a market when they were the ones responsible for the dire consequences in the first place,” said state Rep. Brooks Landgraf, R-Odessa.”

If only they could have guessed that such consequences were possible.

I opened with that particular Ayn Rand quote because it could be interpreted for more than one purpose. With COVID, for instance, is it “initiation of force against dissenters” if the state government imposes laws restricting people’s freedom of action, for example, mandating masks, to stop the spread of the pandemic?

Well, let’s look at it another way. If a storm takes out an old bridge and the state has to put up barriers until a crew can be sent and they have to put up a sign saying “BRIDGE OUT”, is that a restriction of your right to use the roadway? You could interpret it that way. You could just blow past the barrier, go “FUCK you I won’t do what ya tell me” and cross the bridge, at which point, it won’t be the government that’s restricting your freedom. It’ll be gravity.

Pretty much the same point can be made with regard to coronavirus restrictions. We didn’t have to have them, and not every state does. Deciding that your state is “free” of coronavirus restrictions doesn’t make the state free of coronavirus. Plus which, in a lot of cases during the early reaction to COVID-19, private businesses were quicker to create social distancing rules than government, and in the current situation, a lot of places in Texas have announced in the wake of the governor’s decision that they will still mandate pandemic rules, at least for their own employees. (In the case of airlines, they are operating under federal restrictions.) Now surely right-wing followers of Ayn Rand will respect a business owner’s right to dictate the use of their space? Well, we know the answer to that question.

In the Dallas Morning News article, the CEO for the Texas Association of Business said in response to Abbott’s announcement that “The association believes businesses understand the protocols needed to ‘function safely’ and that ‘Texas companies will operate responsibly’.” But if we could trust businesses to operate responsibly, you wouldn’t have the situation you do in Texas with the power grid and the other utilities. At the same time, like I said, businesses on the whole have been more responsible about pandemic restrictions than certain state governments or American Presidents. As I say, it is possible for two different things to be true at the same time. On a case by case level, I can trust people to do the right thing, but not as a rule. There has to be a default standard. THAT’s why you have a government.

But what if the local government is less responsible than the public at large? Ay, there’s the rub.

Part of the problem is that invocations of “freedom” versus “socialism” are not only dodging common sense, they’re using deceptive political labels. The most officially socialist country in the world is the “People’s” Republic of China, which is no less socialist in its desire to have one party control all aspects of the country, they just figured after a few decades of Leninist/Maoist ideology that they wouldn’t get to run it for much longer if the masses were starving and near revolt. So they incorporated just enough capitalism, under strict controls, to keep the structure going. So you have one country that apes a leftist ideology but really has a bunch of guys in business suits in control.

Meanwhile here you have a bunch of professional Christians and ostensible conservatives who want to preserve a nationalist and capitalist system but are finding themselves increasingly unpopular – since after a few decades of ideology the masses are starting to starve – so in order for the guys in business suits to stay in control, they increasingly ape the posture of a one-party socialist regime that among other things says that only people the ruling party deems “patriots” can get to run for a local government. Where have I heard that one before?

That would be the danger to the American experiment even if the Republican faction of the duopoly were competent. As it is, the real danger from a right-wing (or non-socialist) standpoint is that the only alternative presented against the Democrats is a bunch of bad-faith culture war initiatives that are not taken seriously and really are not intended to be taken seriously. Now, if you’re to believe the polls, three out of four Americans approve the $1.9 trillion “Rescue Plan” passed by Congress and signed by President Biden March 11, including at least half of Republicans. The actual Republican Party isn’t even trying to compete with that, even though they still have the numbers to do so. Instead they’re using their media to read Green Eggs and Ham.

So from a right-wing standpoint, the longer these guys are the official NotDemocrat Party, the less likely it is there will be any serious resistance to genuinely bad left-wing ideas, especially when the Party of Trump took the real bipartisan concerns about “the swamp” and used them to promote incompetence, corruption and spite. The only opposition to an open borders policy is internment camps and separating families. The only plan for balancing our trade deficit was a tariff war with China that simply let them expand their trade with everyone else without benefiting us, and shutting down some of our retailers in the process.

And from a left-wing standpoint, a “conservative” party that doesn’t even try to represent its voters is just there. Like a lump. Or an obstacle. They are serving literally no purpose in the government other than to make the Democrats negotiate everything amongst their “progressive” and centrist wings. That does serve the moderating function that a multi-party system would otherwise create, but again that merely emphasizes the twin points that the more the Democrats are expected to absorb every voter and faction that is NotRepublican, the more they have to do everything themselves, for people who are not their natural constituency (if they even have one), because the Republican Party is worse than useless.

If you expect politics to get anywhere and you expect elections to be taken seriously, the Democrats are going to need competition. Do you seriously want that competition to be the Republican Party?

So that’s why I’m going back to the Libertarian Party. There needs to be something else. And please don’t tell me their ideas are horrible and they can’t be taken seriously. You HAVE one faction of the duopoly that has truly horrible ideas that shouldn’t be taken seriously, and yet are. The matter, bluntly, is whether the ideas have any support, and it looks like Republicans are starting to lose that support. Which leads to my third lesson for Libertarians in particular. We’re already against government. But assuming we DO want to get elected, we have to take government seriously. You’ve already got the people who are against government IN government and making a mess of it. You’ve already got the Merry Pranksters. As long as they’re there, they’re going to be making the Right worse and the country as a whole worse. It can’t be that hard to present a constructive alternative to them. You just have to be the grownups in the room, and the fact that Libertarians can be the grownups compared to Republicans shows where we are now. This is a real opportunity that I think must be taken.

Mind you, I will probably be voting Democrat in several elections simply because the Libertarian Party doesn’t post candidates for those races. But you have to start somewhere. I already know there’s no point in trying to change anyone’s mind in the Republican Party, and there’s really no point in trying to sway Democrats either.

I want to have a party for the rest of us.

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.”

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 11^th 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.

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?

So we had what was supposed to be the third presidential debate and was actually the second because Viceroy Trump got himself coronavirus and wouldn’t agree to a virtual debate. This time, both he and challenger Joe Biden were tested on debate night and found negative, so the Commission on Presidential Debates decided to take down the plexiglass barriers that they were going to install between the two men’s podiums.

They were also supposed to mute the inactive candidate’s microphone during the active candidate’s question time, but I still heard these guys talking over each other. And while Trump didn’t “work the ref” with Kristen Welker nearly as much as he did with Chris Wallace (or Lesley Stahl) he still insisted on having his turn even when it wasn’t his turn. But I guess his handlers got the message through to him that not letting anybody else talk at all wasn’t going to work in appealing to the public. So Trump was ONLY as stupid and belligerent as he was in the debates with Hillary Clinton, and it’s doubtful that will work any better for him than it did last time. After all, even Trump fans don’t think it was the debates that won 2016.

The problem is that for all the Trumpublicans’ attempts to make Biden look sleepy, senile and corrupt, when Biden actually gets to talk (as he did tonight) he actually comes off as fairly together and professional, which is only a problem if you, like the Trump fan club, consider being together and professional as a trait of some Deep State disguised lizard person. Trump once again tried to pin Hunter Biden’s scandals on Joe, and he pointed out that the only guy who got in legal trouble over Burisma was Trump when his ethical violations toward Ukraine ended up getting him impeached.

They had a certain amount of time to discuss renewable energy versus environmental initiatives, and Trump said that contrary to opinion, he wanted “the cleanest air… the most crystal clear water..” – all these superlatives without a policy behind them. Apparently no one ever told him that running the White House isn’t like running a used car lot. Biden said (not entirely fairly) that Trump said windmills cause cancer. Trump in his best Biff Tanner mode said, “I know more about wind than you do.” (He’s certainly a lot better at producing it.) And when Biden admitted he wanted a conversion to renewables by 2025, Trump taunted that this would kill the oil industry. And he said, “will you remember that, Texas? Will you remember that, Pennsylvania?” As he himself would say, he wouldn’t have to beg Texas and Pennsylvania for votes if he wasn’t losing.

It’s certainly not impossible to critique the Democrats or counter their arguments, it just looks that way when Donald Trump is your intellectual champion. He had maybe two good points to make against Biden or for himself, and both are, and were, easily countered. One, the coronavirus is in fact making a comeback in a lot of the places where it seemed to be under control. Biden pointed out that the current outbreak in Europe is from a much smaller base of cases than here, precisely because we let the virus get out of control. Secondly, there were a few different points at which the debate went to prison sentencing and other areas where the Trump Organization has made a few token gestures, and Trump kept goading Biden, saying, “you had eight years, why didn’t you do anything about these problems you’re talking about when you had a chance?” First, Biden did respond, but almost in passing, that a lot of his time in the Obama Administration was with a Republican Congress. Secondly, it’s quite true (as a lot of black ‘progressives’ will point out) that the Democrats really didn’t care about sentencing reform, or police brutality, or civil rights issues, and did take non-white constituencies for granted. But that gets to the real issue that I’m not sure Biden is think-outside-the-box enough to get to and was too diplomatic to raise even if he did: Up to this point, Democrats assumed that Republicans were peers whom they disagreed with, and not an enemy who would never negotiate in good faith. During most of the pre-Trump period under Obama, Democrats (and Obama himself) acted as though negotiation was still possible, even when no Republican would vote for the Affordable Care Act and Mitch McConnell said after getting the Senate majority that his goal was to make Obama a one-term president. Even then, you could still assume that was just partisan conservatism, as opposed to obviously being a reactionary, counter-majoritarian policy to disregard the entire rest of the country (even white people) and run things the way the apartheid regime did in South Africa. Thanks to Trump saying the quiet part loud (really loud, and repeatedly), it’s a bit harder for Democrats to deny where they really are, and there’s no reason for them not to play hardball in response.

Otherwise, Biden did what he had to do: He kept pointing out that for all of Trump’s bragging, the country is in the ditch right now, precisely because of his policies. We can’t “learn to live with” coronavirus, as Trump says, because it means more people are going to die needlessly. We can’t get our economy back until we reverse the spread of the disease. And while Trump mocked at Biden’s “kitchen table issues” talk, mocking was all he could do, because he doesn’t have a plan, and everyone knows it.

But since everyone’s minds are made up, the best Biden could do was not screw up, and the best Trump could do was not make things worse for himself. He probably accomplished that. Is it enough to turn the trend away from losing Texas, Pennsylvania, and the other states he needs? As the man would say, “We’ll see what happens.”

Time for lust, time for lie

Time to kiss your life goodbye

Send me money, send me green, heaven you will meet

Make the contribution and you’ll get the better seat

Bow to Leper Messiah

-Metallica, Leper Messiah

Before the first presidential debate of 2020, two days before Viceroy Donald Trump was announced as having coronavirus, it was clear that his “Republican” Party in the Senate was going to ignore all protocols to push his Supreme Court nominee through, specifically to make sure they wouldn’t have to rely on John Roberts and an eight-justice Court in a political strategy that relies less on votes and more on fixing the judicial system to bypass republican voting.

And now, as we have less than four weeks to go before the next election, it is that much more obvious that Trump and his Banana Republican Party would rather cling to power than life itself.

Of course, there was that now famous moment where Trump left Walter Reed hospital and walked up the stairs to stand at the White House portico to take off his mask, which more than one liberal journalist compared to a Mussolini moment. Presumably that would be where Mussolini walked to a balcony to pose dramatically in front of Roman columns, not the moment where he and his mistress tried to escape from Italy, were captured by leftist partisans, and had their bodies hung up by their heels in an abandoned gas station so everyone in that pissed-off country who could reach the scene could spit on his corpse.

As information surrounding Trump’s activities over the past two weeks haphazardly leaked out, and is confirmed at least in the sense that no one in the Trump Organization will deny it, Trump appeared late for his debate with Joe Biden so that unfortunately he could not be independently tested on site. Members of the entourage, including Melania Trump, who has also tested positive for coronavirus, were the only people in the debate audience who refused to wear masks, against protocols. Perhaps because Trump refused then to tell anyone what he and his people knew about his status, thus raising a very real possibility that he went into debate night intending to expose Joe Biden to coronavirus, The Committee on Presidential Debates announced this week that the debate scheduled for next week would be virtual, which was probably for the best anyway because it had already been planned as a town-hall format where the candidates would take audience questions. This of course offended Trump because the video formatting would indeed allow, perhaps require, moderators to cut the mic of the non-active speaker. Not only that, he wouldn’t be able to appear to the crowd in person so that he and his entourage could flout the mask and testing rules and demonstrate yet again that they don’t apply to them. So, predictably, he refused to attend, and predictably the Committee has officially cancelled the debate.

So now that he’s been saved by the most advanced medicine government can provide, he’s making more speeches from a government podium, promising to have more one-party control over the government, promising to give government more control of the economy and health care, promising prosecutions of his enemies, and promising more celebrations of his power and benevolence. Why? To stop America from becoming a socialist nation, of course!

The real problem of course is that Trump’s stupidity has always been more contagious than any virus, and now all of his courtiers feel obliged to follow his example. South Carolina Senator and White House Purse Dog Lindsay Graham for example decided to cancel his second debate with Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison because Harrison insisted that Graham be tested for the virus. I mean, it’s not as though people who hang out on a close basis with the president have been demonstrated as more likely to contract the disease.

Meanwhile as Republicans discuss the election as though it were still a future hypothetical that they don’t have to address in the here and now (much like the possibility that their president’s continual flouting of medical safety could cause him to get COVID-19), people are having early voting and mail-in voting, and it looks like most of the people voting early are Democrats:

“While Democrats fret about the possibility of Mr. Trump repeating his 2016 Election Day turnout that swamped Hillary Clinton’s early-voting lead, Democrats’ early-voting advantage this year, particularly in states like Florida, is worrying top Republicans. While many Republicans expected turnout before Election Day to be slightly depressed by the president’s criticism of mail voting, the gap means that Republicans have to flood the polls on Election Day. And a lack of absentee ballots returned could leave the G.O.P. blind as it adjusts its get-out-the-vote operation in the weeks ahead.

“One of the advantages of having absentee ballots or voting by mail is it gives you a little bit of a snapshot as they are returned, and finding out who is returning them and where you are in your field operation,” said Matt Gorman, a Republican strategist. “If Republicans aren’t getting accurate reads on that, they’re not getting accurate reads on where they need to adjust more.”

Republicans used to take more advantage of the mail-in ballot option. But then, Republicans used to acknowledge science and didn’t think that they should avoid medical safety devices just because their tribal chieftain told them they were full of evil spirits.

This actually matters because to hear observers say it, Team Trump has been betting on an electoral phenomenon called ‘blue shift’ where vote-by-mail and absentee ballots that tend to go Democratic are counted after votes on Election Day and therefore early returns that seem to favor Republicans eventually shift to the other party. However, more states are allowing not just mail-in ballots but early voting where you actually get to vote in person, and thus you don’t have all those votes crammed together to be processed in one day. The early votes would be just as ‘good’ for that purpose as ones in November. This change has happened in some states to account for coronavirus, but other states (like Nevada) have already been doing early voting for years. Republicans, however, don’t seem to have gotten the memo, and are still anticipating in-person November voting as having the same impact as it did before early voting started becoming a thing. That’s why when Democrats are telling people to vote as though their lives depended on it (whether by mail or in-person) Republicans are telling their people to vote in person (and risk Trump Virus) as though their lives don’t matter. The problem is even if Trump has enough cultists that survive another four weeks to go to the polls, they have to show up in sufficient numbers that it would clog the system. We know this because, thanks TO Republican state governments making it more difficult to vote in primaries and special elections, lines for those contests earlier this year have been backed up. This creates the real possibility that the ‘blue shift’ may reverse and more votes will come in for Joe Biden in most states before the Trump votes can all be counted. And since Trump is pinning all his hopes on saying that only Election Day votes count and if he gets more of those, he would be forever Your King, Lord and God, if it turns out that Democrats have more votes on Election Day, whining for more time would make him look that much less omnipotent and that much more like a tool.

Of course as far as the Party of Trump is concerned, even stupid shit like votes don’t really matter, cause if Biden actually wins the Electoral College fair and square, Trump and his cronies in Republican legislatures can just whip up their own slate of Electors for their dominus et deus, the actual vote be damned. And if that maneuver goes to the Supreme Court, guess who just got himself a 6-judge majority?

But this is a tactic that implies weakness, not strength. I’ve mentioned for a while now that pretty soon white people are going to learn what it feels like to be black people, that is, to be disenfranchised. Republicans not only don’t want non-white and poor people with no transportation to polling places to vote, they don’t want anyone else to vote either, which is why they’re herding their own people into a situation where they have to risk coronavirus to do so. Forget ‘it’s a republic, not a democracy’ – the whole principle of a republic is that voters pick representatives, and if the government isn’t letting us do that, it’s NOT a republic anymore.

Secondly, if things get to that point, it will be because the Trumpniks no longer have enough numbers to even win the Electoral College by the skin of their teeth the way they did last time. Not only that, any result where Biden won the Electoral College would probably not be a 2000 election where only one state made the difference. It would be enough of a blowout where the Banana Republicans would have to substitute Electors in several states and thus create several challenges. Furthermore, any result where that happened would probably mean that Democrats also ended up winning the Senate, because however much liberals hate that institution, modern Senate races are statewide contests that are subject to neither district gerrymandering nor the Electoral College.

In other words, even if Republicans took this all the way to the House of Representatives (where they have enough delegations to give the election to Trump), the efforts required to do so, while technically legal, would be that much more cheap and desperate than Trump at a Jeffrey Epstein party. People only put up with the results last time because we knew that the Electoral College was a thing, and we had known it since at least 2000 (even if Democrats chose to forget) and however stupid and awful George W. Bush was, he didn’t actually destroy the country. This time? Not quite. This time it’s getting increasingly clear that the only way Viceroy for Russian North America Donald Trump can be retained as nominal President of this country is if the complicit Republican Party games the system to their benefit. And since it is becoming increasingly clear that the system under their control benefits nobody else, including the Republicans’ favorite interest groups, keeping it in place raises the very real chance that the public is a whole will no longer treat it as legitimate. And at that point Republicans will finally realize that they can’t play “we can do anything we want and nobody can stop us, cause we’re the biggest gang” cause they’re not the biggest gang.

This is why modern people, who don’t find “only one person wins” to be very entertaining, don’t play much MONOPOLY anymore. After four hours of dragging towards a result that everyone can see coming yet has already taken too long to arrive, somebody (maybe even the player in the lead) flips the board over in frustration and everybody else goes, “Next time, why don’t we try Dungeons & Dragons or Cards Against Humanity?”

So in the short term, we had Wednesday’s previously scheduled event where incumbent Vice President Mike Pence went against Democratic California Senator Kamala Harris in the only vice-presidential debate. As in, where you have to choose your favorite vice: socialism or theocracy?

What, you don’t like either of those? You want more choices?? Tough. This is America.

I didn’t actually see any of this live, because as opposed to last Tuesday’s debate, I had something else on my schedule. Plus which: Fuck You, CNN. Going into this, the main controversy was actually over the debate committee’s decision to protect the candidates by installing two plexiglass shields between each of them, an action possibly inspired by the South Carolina US Senate debate, where Democrat Jaime Harrison installed his own shield wall to his podium to protect against Banana Republican (read: rat-licker) Senator Lindsay Graham. I mean, talk about bringing the shade. And because this IS now the party of rat-lickers, Pence’s team objected to installing the shields for the sit-down debate with Senator Harris, although by Wednesday, they eventually relented, possibly because they realized it wasn’t important enough to make a difference.

I mean, most of the post-debate coverage didn’t mention the fly that settled on Pence’s head for about two minutes, but it was all anyone on social media could talk about. It just shows what it takes for Mike Pence to get attention. Plus which, making a big deal of coronavirus restrictions would only point out the fact that Mike Pence is (allegedly) head of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, and they haven’t actually contained the virus.

Other than that, even though moderator Susan Page got some flak for letting Pence go over his time, he didn’t interrupt nearly as much as resident rump, and it worked somewhat to the Republicans’ benefit, because letting Kamala Harris speak let observers judge whether her answers were valid. She, like Joe Biden, was asked to give a straight answer on whether the Biden-Harris Administration would engage in court-packing to counter Republican control of the Supreme Court, and like Biden, refused to do so. The difference being that Trump kept talking over both Biden and Chris Wallace when he was trying to press Biden on the issue, so that the story last week was not “Biden won’t admit he’d pack the Court”, it was “Biden told Trump, ‘Man, why don’t you just shut up?”

I mean, the Democrats ought to at least say they’re keeping the option open, cause after all, FDR didn’t need to actually appoint six more Justices to make his threat work. And if Democrats think that conservatives are so far gone that the only way they can get balance is to appoint their own people, they ought to say so. Republicans are motivated to the point of risking coronavirus over this because they know the results will shape the judicial system for decades. Democrats shouldn’t be that stupid, but they shouldn’t be afraid to show voters that they take the issue as seriously as Republicans.

Otherwise while both candidates dissembled, they both came off as normal politicians, which is not really a good thing, but if this event was normal, it only reinforces the point that the singular factor in making American politics abnormal is Donald Trump, and that while the unpopularity of both Democrats and establishment Republicans helps explain why Trump won the first time, he has had four years to demonstrate that people do not say “this is not normal” because they think that’s a GOOD thing.

Pundits usually say that the Vice President’s first job is ‘do no harm’ which for the challenger’s party really means that the running mate should do no harm to the head of the ticket. Harris certainly didn’t harm Biden, and Pence certainly didn’t harm Trump. But if the result is mostly a wash, we’re left with the fact that Pence is still defending a Trump Organization that is the primary cause of a coronavirus pandemic in America that not only wrecked the economy and weakened their voter support, it’s currently hollowing out their own membership. And everyone knows Pence can’t really do anything about that.

So in that respect, even if one is generous to Pence and calls this debate a draw, a draw does no favors for Republicans.

So now, our divine Sun King, having lain in the Abyss for three days, has risen from Walter Reed Hospital, on behalf of all mankind (meaning, himself) and returned to the White House, without a mask of course. After all, there’s no point in safety precautions now that everyone else there is infected too.

It was clear to most of the press (as in the ones who aren’t Fox or OANN) that Viceroy Trump was not out of the woods (almost every doctor says that you need to isolate for at least 14 days once you’re shown to be positive) and a lot of them watched the film coverage of him ascending the staircase to the upper balcony of the White House and then take his mask off to stand and salute, and said that he looked unwell, straining to breathe. I’m frankly not sure how that’s different from any other day. He always looks like he’s straining to breathe. The impression I got was that he’d rather have been anywhere else but he had to keep up a brave face. As in, more so than usual.

You ever see that video of the two-year old who picked up an onion and started eating it cause he thought it was an apple? And you could tell from his face that he’d made a tremendous mistake, but he kept eating it anyway, to make it look like he MEANT to do that?

You know, this video?

https://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?fr=yset_ff_syc_oracle&p=kid+eating+an+onion#id=1&vid=f5854dac6448ba5c730211b0b57a378b&action=click

That’s Trump.

Based on the information that the Trump Organization has deigned to be released, one of the reasons Trump was feeling well enough to return to his forever home was that doctors had prescribed an uncommon regimen of drugs including not only remdesivir but a steroid called dexamethasone, which is only recommended for patients with a severe case of COVID-19. Which actually makes sense, because Trump would never have gone to the hospital if he could have helped it. After all, they weren’t even going to admit that anyone in the White House had the virus until the news about Hope Hicks leaked out.

The reason that Trump feels so well may be related to the side effects of dexamethasone, which while it has been shown to have real effects in treating the disease also has side effects including: “confusion, delirium, mania, and a higher risk of other infections. The drug can even complicate a patient’s recovery by suppressing the immune system’s virus-fighting response.” That is why it’s only recommended for serious cases.

So: confusion, delirium, mania and a higher risk of other issues. Again, what’s the difference from before?

If these side effects are genuine in this case, the real problem is that they combine with Trump’s already existing personality tendencies, specifically his serious belief in the power of positive thinking. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that concept in its limits, if you can psych yourself up to achieve something that is possible with the right motivation. But there’s a difference between keeping the right attitude and whistling past the graveyard, which in most cases is a metaphor we don’t use literally. When Trump left the hospital Monday, he did a video speech from the entry of the White House, where he said “I just left Walter Reed Medical Center, and it’s really something very special. The doctors, the nurses, the first responders, and I learned so much about coronavirus. One thing that’s for certain, don’t let it dominate you. Don’t be afraid of it. You’re going to beat it. We have the best medical equipment. We have the best medicines all developed recently, and you’re going to beat it. I went … I didn’t feel so good. And two days ago, I could have left two days ago. Two days ago, I felt great. Like, better than I have in a long time. I said just recently … better than 20 years ago. Don’t let it dominate. Don’t let it take over your lives. … Nobody that’s a leader would not do what I did. And I know there’s a risk. There’s a danger. But that’s okay, and now I’m better. Maybe I’m immune. I don’t know. But don’t let it dominate your lives.”

Coronavirus? Nothing to worry about. After all, if you’ve already died, there’s nothing to worry about, and if you’re alive, you’ve got the resources of an entire government and the ability to command Walter Reed Hospital to give you experimental drug treatments. What, most people can’t do that? Well, too bad for them, I guess.

But then, if you’ve already lost your job, lost your movie theatres, lost your favorite shops, lost your favorite restaurants, and lost your favorite relative because of a virus that Trump has let run wild for the better part of a year, the advice “don’t let it take over your lives” might seem a bit odd.

Meanwhile, while Trump continues to believe as usual that nothing bad can happen to him, more and more people in his circle are determined to have coronavirus, including White House Press Secretary For Now Kayleigh McEnany and senior staffer Stephen Miller, an event which confirms that the virus can jump species. There were also at least two unnamed housekeeping staff who got the virus but according to the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman were told to use “discretion” in discussing it with reporters.

And as for making bad decisions on steroids, that might explain the worse-than-usual decision of Trump on Tuesday to announce that there would be no negotiations on a second coronavirus stimulus deal “until after the election when, immediately after I win” a decision that Jonathan Chait called “The Worst Political Blunder In History.” (I don’t know. I’d say that was either voting for Trump or Trump running for president in the first place.)

The problem with this isn’t the idea that there was any question of whether Congress was ever going to get to a coronavirus stimulus bill. It’s not, because Mitch ‘the Bitch’ McConnell has already held up all Senate business except approving Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Amy Comey Barrett, even though the virus now running rampant through Washington is threatening the lives of Senators and possibly Barrett herself. The problem with this maneuver is the idea that Trump has any say in that process and can hold it up because he’s an almighty god of money and prosperity from whom all blessings flow and who will personally stop any chance at economic recovery unless the voters give him the unlimited power to indulge his petty whims and desires for revenge. What this did was reveal that rather than holding the voters’ fates in his hands, it’s the other way around. Trump has confirmed that both he and McConnell are playing an empty hand with no chips. Not only that, Trump blew the one asset he always had, the idea that he was good for the stock market, and could save himself by priming the economy. Now that’s gone. Stock markets crashed on Tuesday. That and perhaps some choice language behind the scenes led Our Very Stable Genius to reverse course and twit shortly before 10 pm Eastern, “The House & Senate should IMMEDIATELY Approve 25 Billion Dollars for Airline Payroll Support, & 135 Billion Dollars for Paycheck Protection Program for Small Business. Both of these will be fully paid for with unused funds from the Cares Act. Have this money. I will sign now!” Ha ha ha. That’s so cute.

I’ve always thought that Trump’s whole approach to the virus was the same as his approach to everything else, where he could just pretend to be the biggest, loudest, meanest, stinkiest ape in the jungle, and he was gonna pound his chest, and bellow to the sky, and BEAT that virus to death with his bare hands. And then his fan club would just shake their heads and say, “Oh, that Trump! He may be a gorilla, but at least he’s OUR gorilla!”

Again, that IS how he’s done everything else so far. And it’s always worked.

Well, apparently that now is the official position of the Party of Trump. The always moronic Matt Gaetz (Banana Republican-Florida) said, “President Trump won’t have to recover from COVID. COVID will have to recover from President Trump.” (Much like the rest of the country.) Embattled Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler actually took an old Donald Trump video from his WWE days and edited it to show him laying the smackdown on coronavirus. (Of course Trump has always had an affinity for pro wrestlers. They have certain things in common: bad decisions, steroids, and making bad decisions on steroids.)

But as I’ve said, it’s one thing to bullshit and bully a social structure, but you can’t bullshit or bully a virus. And while the appeal of Trump may be the idea that he can get away with anything he wants, and you can live vicariously though him, it is getting increasingly hard to live vicariously through Trump when there’s such a high chance of you dying from Trump Virus. (TM) Not only that, it is now harder to believe that Trump can get away with anything he wants, because clearly he was at least infected. And while Trump and his fan club share the goal of presenting Trump (and by extension themselves) as invincible, we’ve already had over 207,000 people die from this thing. How many of them were people who voted Trump in 2016? How many new voters is he going to get this year that he didn’t have last time? Probably not that many, and not enough.

Which is why Trump is so desperate to get back on the stage with Joe Biden for their previously scheduled second debate next week, even though Biden, who at first agreed to continuing the schedule after last week’s fiasco, is now saying that the debate should be called off if Trump is still infected.

But if Trump can’t have a debate, how is he supposed to pretend that everything is okay?? After all: It is better to look good than to feel good. If you know what I mean. And I think that you do.

Well, if Biden won’t let Trump pretend, Trump can always stage his own live event this weekend, and pull out all the stops for his redcap base:

TRUMPOSAURUS!!!

SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUNDAY!

Watch Trumposaurus eat 10 pieces of KFC, a Big Mac, a Filet-O-Fish, a rack of ribs and a large DIET Coke!

SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUNDAY!

Watch TRUMP ride a rolling-coal pickup truck on six-foot high tires over a supply of American farm produce that we’re keeping from the CHINESE!!

SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUNDAY!

Watch TRUMP force Chuckie Schumer and Crazy Nancy Pelosi into a two-on-one battle to THE DEATH – in a STEEEL CAGE MATCH!!!

SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUNDAY!
Watch TRUMPOSAURUS fuck TEN PORN STARS bareback and then break the neck of an endangered Siberian Tiger and EAT ITS HEART!
ALL before a LIVE AUDIENCE!
Get your tickets NOW!!
SUNDAY!
SUNDAY!!
SUNDAY!!!

Well now.

What’s my reaction to Trump getting the ‘rona after telling us all it was the Democrats’ new hoax?

I would first recommend reading David Frum’s column, reproduced from The Atlantic: “What Did You Expect?” That says it as well as anybody could.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/what-did-you-expect/ar-BB19Edcu?ocid=ientp

But in the meantime, it’s good to recall something Mitch McConnell always loves to tell Democrats: “Elections have consequences.”
Indeed they do. For while Clinton Democrats will to their dying days damn Jill Stein and Gary Johnson to the sewer system under the 10^th Circle of Hell for “stealing” votes from Queen Hillary the Inevitable, Stein and Johnson both ran against Romney and Obama in 2012 with no bearing on the outcome, and the real problem with 2016 was the substantially greater percentage who DID vote for Donald Trump, because they had no faith in Hillary Clinton and business-as-usual and were in fact so nihilistic that rather than vote Green or Libertarian they voted for a guy who makes Mr. Haney from Green Acres look as honest as George Washington.

Everybody else knew that Trump was just doing what he does best – marketing himself with unbelievable bullshit – which is why nobody took him seriously until it was too late, including Donald Trump, who according to Michael Wolff at least was absolutely horrified on Election Night when he found out he won.

Because rather than getting to live off of right-wing grievance media for the next four years and play shoulda-coulda-woulda, Trump was actually obliged to govern. Moreover, all the Republicans who controlled Congress were obliged to repeal and replace Obamacare and do all those things they said they couldn’t do because of Barack Obama’s veto.

So (since Trump had no idea how to fulfill his pie-in-the-sky populist promises and needed to keep old-time Republican loyalty) Trump abandoned everything he said about healthcare and infrastructure and raising taxes on the rich and went along with what Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell wanted him to. This led to the Ryan Congress’ tax cut bill that Trump signed, and the unpopularity of a tax cut should have signaled that the Republican Party was becoming less popular in general. Seeing the writing on the wall, House Speaker Paul Ryan refused to run for re-election even though he could have easily kept his seat, knowing he wouldn’t keep his Speaker’s post- and not desiring to be around Trump any longer. And while Republicans did keep the Senate in 2018, they also lost the House, and that soon meant that all those scummy deals that Trump made with shady banks to avoid personal bankruptcy prior to 2016 were under investigation by Democrats, along with the possibility that Vladimir Putin put his thumb on the scales to influence our elections (a rumor which, IF true, is probably looking less and less like a good idea every day), not to mention Trump’s arm-twisting of the Ukrainian president to create dirt on Joe Biden, which is what actually got him impeached.

But because the low-tax, pro-business policy of the Republicans superficially bolstered the economy, Trump retained a core of popularity with both his base and people who didn’t really like him but liked the results they were getting. So Trump, being as deep as a layer of water spilled on the countertop, assumed that all he needed to do to stay in power (and stay out of jail) was to keep the good news going and do everything he could to keep anyone from hearing any bad news. In this he was simply emulating an actual one-party dictator: Xi Jinping, who by the time impeachment was winding down at the top of the year was facing reports of a coronavirus out of Wuhan that was rapidly spreading. And at the time, Xi was doing everything he could with his one party socialist state to keep the news from getting out, and then once the disease spread to Iran and elsewhere, to keep people from knowing how bad it really was. But since at the time, Donald Trump was also pursuing a big trade deal with China, he was at pains to help Xi in this effort, even going so far as to tweet on January 24:

China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 24, 2020

A line which may stand as Donald Trump’s political epitaph, and perhaps his actual one.

It could have been different. The governor of New York, like the leaders in Italy, Britain and other places, at refused to acknowledge the true depth of the threat, and this led to massive casualties. But the leaders in Europe learned from this and radically changed their policies on social gatherings to suppress the spread of the virus and flatten the curve. They did something similar in New York. But we could not, and cannot, do that as a national policy in America, because Trump was fixated on not taking the virus seriously, because making people aware of how serious it was would cause “a panic”, and that would cause the economy to crater – never mind the fact that the economy already was cratering because private businesses and various governors were taking the virus seriously and cutting back their activities, which we now have to do for the foreseeable future because unlike the Europeans, we have never had a plan to reduce the spread so that we can resume some level of normalcy.

And as part of his continuing campaign to present himself as the invincible Sun King, Trump continued to hold indoor events with huge crowds, even after Tulsa, where masks were offered but subtly discouraged, even as Trump himself made sure to be on podiums where his exposure to the masses was minimized. His staffers, and Secret Service detail, weren’t so lucky. This may be why Hope Hicks ended up getting the virus. Which allegedly is how Trump got it. But according to Chris Wallace, Trump was not independently tested in Cleveland prior to Tuesday’s presidential debate, and we might not even know now that he was sick if Bloomberg hadn’t reported the news about Hicks. After all, Thursday October 1 (between the debate and the breaking news) Trump was at a fundraiser at his Bedminister, New Jersey golf resort where he was in casual contact with at least 30 donors, without masks. The campaign apparently knew about Hicks at the time but hadn’t released her condition. And while both Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Britain’s Boris Johnson survived their own cases, the Trump Organization is being cagey about exactly what the president’s symptoms are. One ominous sign: He isn’t tweeting all that much.

If only Trump had never run. And if that’s the thought going through his mind right now, I don’t think it would be the first time.

As I said about Freddie Mercury, I have no problem saying that he and other gay men died as a direct result of their lifestyle when the AIDS crisis first happened, just as us fat folks have to be careful with Type II diabetes and smokers are almost sure to get lung cancer.

Coronavirus is something I would not wish on my worst enemy. Which right now happens to be Trump. But whatever you think of him, the President being laid low is a very serious event. It’s especially serious to his party with about four weeks left to campaign. So because everything is so serious, Republicans are expecting us all not to joke, or gloat, at a time like this.

But as most professional Christians would tell us, gay men could not defy reality forever without either succumbing to the plague or changing their lifestyle, and so we have here. This is not callousness against the unfortunate. There’s a difference between having compassion for one in needless suffering from a random event and walking into the lion pen at a zoo with a raw steak on your head and expecting a healthy result.

I have often told friends that the phrase “The Republican Party” is how Americans pronounce “Schadenfreude.” But there isn’t even much point in feeling Schadenfreude here. It’s like when Stephen Colbert said, “some people are saying this is an October Surprise. It seems more like an October ‘well… yeah.”

We do not need to cast curses on Trump and his cult or say they “deserved” this. As a once-wise man said, “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.” This is cause and effect.

Cause and effect is not the same thing as karma. “Karma” is a nebulous concept from Eastern religion that holds that two apparently random events are connected by spiritual intent. It’s like when Penn Jillette defined the concept of luck as “taking probability personally.”

If ‘karma’ was a thing, or casting bad vibes at a person actually worked, or the Old Testament God was real, some people would be piles of ash now. You’re not going to get anywhere sticking pins in Donald Trump dolls because you hate him so much. I mean, if witchcraft was real, we could prove it. If witches really did cast a curse on Donald Trump, then his entire life would spiral out of control all of a sudden, he’d get sleepy and confused, and his dick would be like a mosquito.

I have mentioned before that I am, or at least was, a big fan of Ayn Rand. And just as the same Trumpublicans who delight in liberal tears are fluttering their fans at liberals daring to say bad things about our Bestest Most Americanest President Ever now that he’s really suffering, those same liberals who pride themselves on their compassion loathe Rand because of her deliberate lack of compassion in her non-fiction and fiction works.

A big example of this is in the center of Rand’s epic Atlas Shrugged, where the railroad company Taggart Transcontinential had advertised the run of a fancy new diesel-powered train through the Rockies, only to have the train break down. There were no other diesel engines available, and the only other rail transport was an old-timey coal burner. This method was not recommended because the tunnel through the mountains was sufficiently long that a coal-burning train would not be able to get through because the tunnel was not set up to ventilate the smoke. Nevertheless, a connected politician demanded that railroad employees set up a coal train to go through the tunnel so he could get to his destination without having to wait. The result, as predicted, was that the engine went midway through the tunnel and ended up choking to death on its own fumes. As did the politician and all the other passengers. At which point an Army munitions train, going in without knowledge of the makeshift schedule because the diesel train would have normally cleared the route by then, ran into the passenger train and the fumes ignited the munitions and blew everything up.

And over the course of this scene, Rand goes over various individual cases of deaths: “It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them.
“The man in Bedroom A, Car No. 1, was a professor of sociology who taught that individual ability is of no consequence, that individual effort is futile, that an individual conscience is a useless luxury, that there is no individual mind or character or achievement, that everything is achieved collectively, and that it’s masses that count, not men. … The woman in Bedroom D, Car No. 10, was a mother who had put her two children to sleep in the berth above her, carefully tucking them in, protecting them from drafts and jolts; a mother whose husband held a government job enforcing directives, which she defended by saying, ‘I don’t care, it’s only the rich that they hurt. After all, I must think of my children.’
… The man in Bedroom A, Car No.14, was a professor of philosophy who taught that there is no mind – how do you know that the tunnel is dangerous? – no reality – how can you prove that the tunnel exists? – no logic – why do you claim that trains cannot move without motive power? – no principles – why should you be bound by the laws of cause and effect? – no rights – why shouldn’t you attach men to their jobs by force? – no morality – what’s moral about running a railroad? – no absolutes – what difference does it make to you whether you live or die anyway?. He taught that we know nothing – why oppose the orders of your superiors? – that we can never be certain of anything – how do you know you’re right? – that we must act on the expediency of the moment – you don’t want to risk your job do you?”

One moral difference that does exist between reality and Rand’s fiction is that she established that everyone in the passenger train was on some level complicit in their fate because the system they endorsed led to that result. This is another reason liberals hate Rand, the suggestion that those who suffer deserve it because of their politics. In reality, the Republicans have made lots of innocent people suffer before them, largely because of their politics and the idea that some people didn’t matter. Like the mother in Bedroom D, Car 10, they didn’t care, cause only the bad people got hurt. And then they did too. Rand’s targets were the left wing collectivists and anti-capitalists, which is why she is so hated by the “compassionate” people, but the principle is the same. Compassion, however virtuous, is not the issue. If one really wants to reduce suffering, one must act on its causes.

The ‘Taggart Tunnel’ was not an example of karma. It was the author’s attempt to demonstrate an ultimate chain of cause and effect. The Atlas Shrugged train disaster is taken by Rand’s critics as a prime example of how preachy and didactic she was, especially since the this-is-the-house-that-Jack-built chain of events were engineered by the author just to demonstrate a certain point. But what we have in reality is a scenario that Rand would have rejected as too obvious and didactic.

According to one report, for every 1000 people in their mid-70s or older who get the coronavirus, 116 will die. Trump is 74.

In the days immediately preceding the Tuesday debate, Trump hosted a Rose Garden party to present Amy Comey Barrett, his choice for the new Supreme Court Justice, who has survived her own case of coronavirus earlier this year. Most of the people at the outdoor event were not wearing masks. After the speeches, there was a lot of casual contact amongst the audience. By Saturday evening, more than a dozen people connected to the White House were reporting positive cases, including Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel, Utah Senator Mike Lee, who attended the Barrett event, Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien, and publicist Kellyanne Conway.

The fact that Senators are affected may ultimately ruin the majority that Trump and Mitch McConnell need to push this nomination through the Senate. It would be Rand Paul all over again, only exponentially more so.

In the short term, Trump is literally killing, or at least maiming, the Republican Party. And as I’ve said, that will create the very result they most claim to fear. Not only are we going to be stuffed to the gills with “socialism” (because we’re going to need A LOT of government spending, and tax hikes, to cover the costs of a preventable illness that Trump let spread, and to stimulate an economy that he decimated) but we on the Right are going to be undermined in our attempts to stop the Left from nanny-stating all aspects of life “for your own good.” Because it’s pretty damn clear that there really are people who not only don’t care about their own good but are actively working towards their own evil. (The fact that they spread misery and death to so many other people in the process is just a bonus.)

And in the meantime- there’s Donald Trump. A man who has probably never heard of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and her five stages of coming to terms with loss. And while Trump is very good at the denial and anger part (it’s got him to where he is now) and has spent most of his life trying to avoid depression, let alone acceptance of that which he cannot change, I’m sure Mr. Art Of The Deal is very much engaged in the bargaining stage right now:

“Hey, ah, God? Yeh, it’s me, Donald. So all these preachers around me are telling me I should talk to you. You know how they are. I don’t know how you can stand ’em myself. I only put up with them cause they get me votes. All they says is like ‘love no man or money more than Jesus.’ ‘Anything is possible if you believe on Jesus’ name.’ It’s Jesus this, Jesus that. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Jesus! I mean really, who died and made HIM God?”

“But they’re right about one thing. There’s no way I could have gotten to this point without you. Remember that Access Hollywood tape? Remember me begging for Russian help with Hillary’s emails? And I WON anyway? Remember all those times that people thought I should resign or I’d be impeached, and then I was impeached, and nothing happened! I KNEW you were looking out for me! Everything that’s happened so far must be an act of God! I knew you wouldn’t have let things get to this point if I wasn’t part of your plan! So I can’t die now!

“…what do you mean, ‘I don’t need you anymore…’?

“Nobody says that to Donald Trump! I say that to my wives!!!

“Who do you think you ARE! You know who I am, buddy? Who’s your fucking manager??

“Whaddya mean, I’m subject to the same diseases as anybody else? Whaddya mean I’m not immortal? Who SAYS??

“I’m DONALD TRUMP!!! My entire life has taught me that I don’t have to obey the same rules as other human beings! I’M NOT A HUMAN BEING!!!!

“Wh- you- you better be nice to me, God! You better be NICE to me! This is very unfair! I know where you buried the bodies!! Michael Cohen told me stories about Jerry Falwell Jr. that would curdle your balls! Bill Barr’s a Catholic, he can investigate your Pope! You know what pervy shit he can find out there!

“Look at all these Justices I got ya! You don’t think that counts for something?? I can get ya more! LOTS more! Just let me live!!
“Goddamn it, God, YOU OWE ME, MOTHERFUCKERRRRR”