“If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”
– Rush, “Freewill”
As we could all predict by now, Donald Trump, Once and Future Viceroy for Russian North America, has not only gotten more tasteless than ever but during Holy Week decided to lean that much harder into his Christ complex than he did last year.
Like, selling a Bible that anybody could pick up for practically free and packaging it with a copy of the Constitution (which he’s also never read) and the lyrics to “God Bless The USA” all for the low, low price of $59.99. Something tells me this text isn’t going to include the Gospel passages where Christ chases the moneychangers from the Temple but again, that’s assuming that the fan club has actually read that part.
Look, all I’m saying is, if Trump wants to prove he’s Jesus, all he has to do is get nailed to a cross – live on TV, so we can all see him scream – get hung up in the air, die of exposure, and come back after three days. THEN I’ll worship him as God. Deal?
No, no, no, Feds, I am not threatening to kill a (former) president. I mean, if Trump IS Jesus, if he dies, he comes back, right? No harm, no foul!
Now if Donnie knows he ISN’T the Messiah – and we all know that even if he is, he’s too cowardly to take the chance – then maybe he should shut his fat mouth with the comparisons to Jesus.
And while he’s at it, he should quit saying he’s been treated worse than Abraham Lincoln. How do we know you haven’t been treated worse than Lincoln, Donnie? You’re STILL ALIVE, aren’t you?
For Trump to be treated as bad as Lincoln, he would have to be assassinated by a Confederate sympathizer who was angry that Trump stopped a white supremacist insurrection against the United States government. Somehow I consider that less likely than Trump opening his tomb after three days.
Although Trump is establishing a pretty good case for life after death, not just in that he is still walking around after almost eighty years of an indulgent lifestyle that would kill most men, but because he is clearly able to walk around with no brain activity. Most of us observed even when Trump was President that his command of vocabulary was greatly limited even compared to where it was a few years before 2015. Now it’s impossible not to notice how he slurs, forgets basic words and gets people’s names mixed up, like when he says that Barack Obama is the current president and not Joe Biden. Or when he twitted that Jimmy Kimmel and Al Pacino at the Oscars were the same guy.
Trump is like a dog. He’s only got so many brain cells to process a given mental activity. Like, have you ever been in a room and had a conversation with someone, and a dog is in the room, and you are talking about any number of things, and one of you says the word “food” and the dog’s ears prick up? That’s Trump. He hates the current President for usurping his throne, but he really hates Barack Obama (cause, reasons) so he fuses his present object of hatred with his primary one. Likewise, he has always hated Nancy Pelosi but currently hates Nikki Haley for impeding his path to coronation, so he kept repeating Nikki Haley’s name and blaming her as Speaker for the events of January 6, when everyone knows she wasn’t the Speaker then, it was Pelosi. But Trump’s brain isn’t complex enough to make these subtle distinctions.
The problem is, Trump is a meal ticket for a lot of people, some of whom are not even Russian. And they have to strike the balance between Trump being just dumb enough to manipulate and not so mentally incontinent that he gives the game away. So I’m sure one of his people had to tell him that he has to put a lid on these blankouts or else Ivanka is going to have to take him to a nice memory care facility where you eat dinner with plastic utensils. So Trump came up with an explanation that will satisfy the intellect of both himself and his fan club: Whenever he confuses Obama with Biden, it’s because Obama is really the one in charge and Trump calls him the President sarcastically. Or as political strategist Pee-Wee Herman would say, “I meant to do that.”
(You will recall that Trump has also adopted other campaign strategies from Pee-Wee Herman, such as ‘NEHHH!’ and ‘I know you are, but what am I ?’)
No doubt when, not if, Trump goes into a fugue state, drops his pants and looses his bowels on stage in full view of reporters and cameras, he will explain the incident after the fact as his postmodern symbolic commentary on the worth of the Democratic Party and its campaign promises. The fun will be watching the rest of his Party try to play along.
Trump said that if Biden wins, it would be “the end of democracy.” Which is really just his typical projecting. But in a way he’s right.
Because we should not be confused into thinking that “democracy” in the US actually means democracy or representative government. Americans say “democracy” to refer to our political system like we say “Levi’s” to refer to jeans or “Coke” to refer to any random soda pop when anybody who knows the difference between Coke and Pepsi and prefers one to the other would probably not appreciate the generalization. When we say “democracy” we just mean “the way we’re accustomed to doing things.” And the way America has been accustomed to doing things is that we are in effect only allowed to vote for one of two political parties, in exchange for which the two parties graciously allow each other’s existence and trade places in the government majority every once in a while. But like an officially de-segregated school where the races never hang out together, states have been grouping up into one-party blocs for a while, and people in one state can’t see the opinions of states run by another party as legitimate. This has been kind of a default in the Democratic-liberal echo chamber, but it is actually being enforced by law and legal maneuvering in Republican-run states, even in states where Democrats can’t get the time of day and such maneuvering shouldn’t even be needed. And because of such maneuvering, Republicans are starting to get a backlash even in those states. So if Biden wins, the Party of Trump will just confirm in their own minds that this government is an illegitimate imposition on their right to rule, and if Trump wins, the Democrats, and probably everyone else who doesn’t vote for Trump, will see it as a coup, even in the increasingly unlikely event that Trump has the votes to win fair and square like he did in 2016.
This is no longer a two-party system. It is one party that actually wants to have a government versus an insurgency. And when that insurgency is actually in charge, as with the Trump Organization before 2021 or the House of Representatives now, they can’t get anything done besides using government force to go after their enemies, who often include each other. And as the Republican Party becomes that much more a literal Party of Trump, where individual members only exist as extensions of the Leader’s will, it becomes that much more of an all-or-nothing situation, by his demand. In fact it has to be, as Trump’s lifelong criminal tendencies only metastasized with the opportunity of his office and the former real-estate cheat became an outright threat to national security who has to be investigated and prosecuted.
This is an all-or-nothing election, by Trump’s demand, whether anybody else wants it or not. You might wish that once this is over, we can all get back to an equilibrium between the two parties in the status quo ante, but the old order is gone and will not come back, because the people who actually run the Republican Party don’t want the old Republican Party, even if Trump dies tomorrow. As it is, we already know Trump will not simply retire and co-exist with other political actors like every other president and losing candidate before him has. This election is very simple: Do you want Donald Trump to be your King or do you want Donald Trump to go to jail?
Those are the only two choices. It is not a choice of whether you prefer the Republican or third-party candidate in Congress to the Democrat. It is not even a question of whether you think Joe Biden should be President. And it is certainly not an issue with a box of Wheaties being eight dollars at the store. The choice is: Do you want Donald Trump to be an unaccountable God-Emperor or do you want Donald Trump to be investigated and prosecuted for his crimes? Because Donald Trump, with his “presidential immunity” tactic, will accept no other terms. Any vote that is not for Joe Biden and Democrats down-ballot, whether it’s third-party, ticket splitting, or staying home, is a vote for Donald Trump to be your King. Any vote that is for Democratic candidates is a vote for Trump to go to jail. And if the Trumpniks actually seem to be leaning into the idea of “vote in November so we’ll never have to vote again”, I don’t think enough non-Trumpniks seem to be grasping the full implications of what it means to oppose Trump, why he must be opposed totally, and what would have to happen if he is defeated.
It is the reason that Mitch McConnell and various other Republican Senators who knew better did not join the Democrats in impeachment after January 6. Because it was perceived that this would mean breaking with Trump’s “MAGA” movement and if they did that, the Republican Party would effectively cease to exist. It might hold on in “safe” seats but those seats are usually safe only because of the kind of people who go along with MAGA.
We could go to war with these people. If that seems radical, just remember that they declared war on the rest of us when they decided to support an insurrectionist who wanted to overturn an election to stay in power. But as Eric Stratton would say, that would take years, and cost millions of lives.
Trump is perceived as invincible because his movement is perceived as invincible, and this reinforces his cult’s identity fusion, because the cult follows Trump because they perceive HIM as invincible. He gives them the freedom to be their worst selves because he gets to indulge his most lowbrow, evil, animal instincts and get away with it, so they think they can too. But anybody can see that it’s not entirely mutual. Trump’s underlings DO go to jail. Trump’s political followers do lose election recounts and have their “election was rigged” cases thrown out of court. Even Steve Bannon and Paul Manafort got sent to prison briefly, although Trump pardoned them, which gets to a different point.
And in a lot of those cases, a lot of those defendants expressed regret for their actions in court, once they realized their actions had consequences. But then a lot of them went back on their public statements and returned to insurrectionist rhetoric. Why? Because Trump is still a free man who gets to do whatever he wants so they figure their Savior is going to come back and restore the Kingdom.
The obvious way to break this identity fusion is to make the insurrectionists realize that consequences accrue to everybody, including the Leader.
Rhetorically speaking, kill the head and the body will die.
Here’s a really radical communist idea that you could only come up with after smoking a foot-long blunt laced with PCP. You ready?
You sitting down?
You’re holding on to your chair?
Here it is:
What if – when there is a law on the books where punishment for violation includes jail time, and someone breaks that law, they go to jail?
Seize it if you try.
Or, what if, when a defendant is found guilty at trial and sentenced to pay a settlement, and obliged to put up a bond at settlement or forfeit assets, that person actually pays the bond, on time – as opposed to getting the bond cut by more than half, and getting more time to pay it?
I know, right? It’s like no one else THOUGHT of this before!
But this gets to the flip side of the problem, which is that if Republicans don’t want to impose order on their organization (which is what a political party is for) because then the duopoly would cease to exist, the “normie” Democrat-aligned establishment is handling Trump with kid gloves and a ten-foot pole because they realize the duopoly would cease to exist if they went after the mobster who took over one of the ruling parties like a Stage 4 cancer. I have been telling Republicans, over and over and over again, that if they keep going down this path with Trump, America really will be a one-party state, and that one party will be the Democrats. And nobody wants that. Including the Democrats. Because then they’d actually have to take responsibility for something.
And the whole premise of modern American government is avoiding taking responsibility. The idea that someone, somewhere else, is going to solve the problem, and not me. Sometimes – not as often as we want to think – that actually works. It will not work with Trump, who is a barnacle on the system that will not just go away and do what he’s expected to do like Hillary Clinton or George W. Bush. At this point, refusing to confront Trump is catering to him, and that will irreversibly alter the system just as much as the radical un-American commie idea that elites who commit crimes should go to jail like everybody else.
When the republic was founded, even between the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, the idea was not to have the kind of government that the Colonies had under George III. From now on, the premise of political science is to not have the kind of government that would cater to Donald Trump. If only because recent historical example demonstrates that giving the President unchallenged authority and unlimited benefit of the doubt only incentivizes career criminals to seek the office. Like, in addition to putting Supreme Court Justices on term limits so that the institution isn’t quite so dependent on the choices of one President, we should state flat out that the President IS under the same laws as everyone else and can be investigated and prosecuted by the FBI just like everybody else. Because impeachment will never work due to partisanship, and any truly partisan investigation untroubled by facts will flounder at the start, as even the Republicans have been obliged to acknowledge with their investigations of Joe Biden. Not only that we should take away a lot of the powers that have been given to the presidency, like the sole power to pardon, which in the cases of both Trump and Bill Clinton has been used with ulterior motive.
Of course that would not only require voting in Democrats (or non-Republicans) nationally, it would require voting in the kind of people who understand why things need to change and will actually change them. But again, it’s either that, or one way or another you are voting for the status quo, and one way or another the status quo is going to die because “conservatives” will not work to preserve it and are actively trying to destroy it. Responsibility cannot be avoided. A choice needs to be made regardless.
I already know what my decision is, but it’s not just my decision.
It’s yours.