No way to delay the trouble comin’ every day.
- Frank Zappa & The Mothers (of Invention) “Trouble Every Day”
I’m reading last year’s papers
Although I don’t know why
Assassins, cons and rapers
Might as well die
– Steely Dan, “King Of The World”
While the Cabinet nominations of President-inept Donald Trump continue to draw flak, it might actually be more newsworthy what the Trump team’s default “Plan B” is. Specifically, Trump’s most offensive pick, former Congressman Matt “Morrissey Called, He Wants His Hairstyle Back” Gaetz, withdrew from consideration when he failed to sway Republican Senators who had voted twice to acquit Trump during impeachment. But after that, Trump announced his backup choice, Pam Bondi, the former state Attorney General in Florida. Among other things, she had received a donation from Trump in 2013 and subsequently decided not to have Florida join a joint lawsuit against Trump University. But that level of corruption is par for the course these days. Otherwise Bondi is perfectly qualified for the job as well as totally loyal to the new order, and not so provocative that she draws the wrong kind of attention.
Now it seems like another Trumpnik, Fox News employee Pete Hegseth, may lose his appointment to Secretary of Defense after he turned out to be a full-time alcoholic with a television anchor hobby. According to several sources including Politico, Trump has several choices waiting in the likely eventuality that Hegseth also hits a wall in confirmation. The leading choice is Ron DeSantis, the Florida Governor himself. Given that he’s term-limited he has reason to seek higher ground. He also has real military and legal qualifications, having been a Navy officer and serving with JAG. And he’s also the guy who set the standard for making his home state an unassailable stronghold for Republican dominance.
I have not actually read Machiavelli’s The Prince, but there is an often-quoted section of it where the author says a prince may often improve his reputation by first appointing a ruthless official who accomplishes goals expediently but alienates the population, and when this happens, he simply gets rid of said official and appoints someone else without an obnoxious reputation who will be in his own way ruthless but more subtle. In this way the prince creates relief among his subjects. (The historical example in the text is Cesare Borgia.)
I’m pretty sure Trump has never read Machiavelli – I doubt he can spell Machiavelli – but I’m sure that supporters like Steven Bannon have, and they would be in position to advise Trump. But that raises the question of whether he would take the advice. Or why he would foist appointees who are obnoxiously bad even by Republican standards. It could just be that Trump is exactly what he appears to be, a pudding brain with less maturity or self-control than a five-year old.
This leads to another point. I am normally loathe to make direct comparisons between Trump and Hitler, mainly because they always make Hitler look better. But there is at least one obvious parallel. In Weimar Germany, after World War I, the political establishment was composed of bourgeois conservative parties and the Social Democrat left, which was being pressured by even more left-wing parties. And then you had the reactionaries (namely the military and industrialists) who were running things under the German Empire and who blamed the Left for losing the war even though they weren’t in charge of the government at the time. These groups saw Adolf Hitler as a lowlife rabble-rouser, but they could see his popularity and saw him as a vehicle to maximize their ends while minimizing Hitler’s. Specifically they sought evil and reactionary but feasible goals like suppressing dissent and re-militarizing the country, as opposed to Hitler’s crackpot goals, like, starting a war with everybody at once.
Well, in this country you have an unpopular bourgeois Left Democratic Party that is being pressured by even less popular “progressives” and directly opposed by a reactionary, Christianist Right that is even less popular than them. (For example, Mike Pence and JD Vance.) Donald Trump, an angry, popular demagogue, just happened to side with them and their party, and made his popularity synonymous with their success. And everyone in the used-to-be republican Party goes along with him because they see Trump as a vehicle for their evil, reactionary but feasible agenda (namely turning America into a Hungarian-style one-party regime) and not so much for Trump’s crackpot ideas (like invading Mexico or assimilating Canada).
The German reactionaries failed to control Hitler because his cult of personality was far too large and they needed him a lot more than he needed them. And that’s pretty much why no one in the Republican Party speaks out against the cult that it has become. But the difference may be that people are able to recognize how decayed Trump has become over nine years. Come to think of it, the German generals were starting to realize by 1943 how physically and mentally ill Hitler was.
Where was I? Oh yeah, it looks like the Senate isn’t waiting for Trump to start a war with every other power on the globe before they push back, because it’s increasingly likely he won’t be able to throw out the election system and declare himself President for Life before he dies of natural causes. Which at the rate he eats may be January. More likely the second “Administration” will wait about two years to suddenly declare that Trump is mentally unfit under the 25th Amendment so that JD Vance can take over. Why two years? Because according to the 22nd Amendment, a person can serve as president for a theoretical maximum of ten years, two four-year terms and up to two years after succeeding a president: “no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.” The question then is whether that cult is going to go along with it. If the gambit works I’m not sure it would be better or worse than Trump surviving. If the stringpullers depose their figurehead they would have a more stable regime, but that would also make it harder to overthrow. If Trump continues to rule as a demented king, he might destroy the whole basis of his party’s support, but that would require him to do truly horrendous levels of damage to the country. As in, more than he already has.
And lest it seem that the Trump Party has a real mandate for any of this, let me again point out that Trump didn’t increase his vote totals much, if any, from 2020. He got a majority popular vote and swept the swing states because at least ten million people who voted for Biden and Democrats in 2020 stayed home this year. This election was at least as much a vote of no-confidence in the establishment as it was an assertion of MAGA theology. Which leads to a much more ominous event.
On December 4, 6:45 am in New York, United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was on a street in New York on his way to an 8 am UHC investors meeting when he was shot and killed. The 8 am meeting went on as scheduled.
And from what I see of the social media reactions, no one is shedding a tear.
There are now several camera shots of the suspect which are being circulated and they all show a tall white guy wearing a hooded jacket and backpack, except that some pictures show the backpack with dark straps and others show it with light straps. So the suspect is a tall, thin, white guy with angular features, in a hooded jacket and wearing a backpack whose description varies according to the camera shot, and which he is no longer wearing.
I’m pretty sure whoever did it got this idea from that Timothee Chalamet lookalike contest they held in New York City recently. Hell, the assassin might be one of the guys from that contest. Hell, he might BE Timothee Chalamet.
Nobody wants to help catch this guy. And if they DID, all he has to do is wait four years and run for President.
Seriously, unlike most people I am NOT saying this assassination is a good thing. Protesting our extortionist healthcare system by shooting one of its executives would be like a 19th Century person killing a plantation owner and thinking that got rid of slavery. That took Constitutional amendments. And of course a Civil War to force the issue on the people who wanted slavery in the first place.
The overwhelming Schadenfreude at the billionaire’s death, and the very fact that it happened, just indicates how many people in America have given up thinking that this system is going to protect the innocent. It doesn’t even protect its own. After all, this country had a chance to vote for a government that could have made things more progressive and equitable, and instead people chose, if only by inaction, to make the system exponentially worse.
Because they think, for good reason, that the “progressive” party doesn’t care about them, so they don’t care about it. And as I just said, when the law doesn’t apply to the powerful, it doesn’t apply to anybody, and the only way you can have justice is to get it yourself.
I am seriously starting to think that the only way to fix things, or even try, is to flush it all out and start from scratch. Let’s call it the US Constitution 2.0. Because you can’t expect Republicans to fix this system when it’s exactly what they want and you can’t expect Democrats to fix it when they did so much to get things to this point.