Twlight of a God With Feet of Clay

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

Donald Trump and his supporters, especially those that make Gotcha social media posts and the 5 o'clock news, are officially the joke of the planet. That perhaps includes other planets with beings far more intelligent than we who are monitoring our electronic communications.

    That includes a wide range of cranks from the harmless ones that attempt to post "neener neener" comments to this blog denying Biden's win and harping on misspellings to those who are doxxing and making death threats to Secretaries of State such as Arizona's, Katie Hobbs. Hobbs, a Democrat, has been getting death threats phoned in to her office as well as on Parler, a more right wing version of Facebook used by refugees who were banned by major social media sites. All this, even as the Arizona GOP is lobbying the state's courts to essentially invalidate the vote count of Maricopa County (the state's largest, accounting for 60% of the state's electorate).

   These threats and L.L. Bean demonstrations taking place in vote counting places in battleground states that Trump lost are indistinguishable from the Tea Bagger morons who a decade ago were screaming about the death panels in the still-debated Affordable Care Act, the same ACA that has wound up saving their lives during this pandemic that was enthusiastically fanned across the country by the tire fire currently masquerading as an actual presidential administration.

    Meanwhile, Trump's visibility is almost exclusively restricted to micro rants that are invariably fact-checked (But, pointedly, not removed) on Twitter that just make Trump look like Dirty Steve in the infamous peyote scene in Young Guns, darting out of his cave to scream, "Did you guys see the size of that chicken!?", firing his gun then darting back into the cave.

    However, in real life, while Dirty Steve's shot fortunately missed Kiefer Sutherland's Doc Scurlock, Trump's own fire is impeccably-aimed and is taking out his top security officials that include Defense Secretary Dr. Mark Esper and, just last night, Christopher Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Krebs committed the unpardonable sin of doing his job and calling the 2020 election "the most secure... in American history."

     In other words, the former security chief at Microsoft and the man who'd admirably done his job at keeping our elections secure from Russian meddling (in spite of the best efforts of the Republican Party), was fired, via tweet, for doing his job, thereby defending his professional honor, and refuting Trump's completely unsubstantiated charges, lies and conspiracy theories. In short, Krebs didn't show the requisite loyalty to a sham emperor in the twilight of his purloined empire.

     And now FBI Director Christopher Wray, who'd called out right wing extremism being our number one domestic terrorist threat and torture enthusiast Gina Haspel, the CIA Director, are also in Trump's baleful crosshairs. That would almost completely decapitate our national security infrastructure, leaving in their wake only Trump loyalists with, to put it mildly, questionable credentials.

"The Crackpot Factor"

Today in Salon, Amanda Marcotte published an article entitled, "The Crackpot Factor: Why the GOP is worried about turning out the vote after Trump." In it, she sees a Republican Party desperately trying to revive the magic of Trumpism without a Donald Trump. But she reveals several key flaws in her thinking on this matter:

     Number one, Trumpism is a dead cult without Trump and, like a noxious weed cut from its stem, it will wither and die when Trump loses his power and relevancy at noontime, January 20th 2021. Number two, MAGAts will accept no substitutes unless their name happens to also be Trump but even if it's Ivanka, Don, Jr or Eric, it still won't be the same. None of them has their father's genius for catapulting the propaganda or inflaming the neo Nazi, white supremacist base. None of them can claim, as Trump infamously had in 2016, of being able to shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose a single vote.

    Number three, it's far likelier that even Trump's most vicious supporters in Congress, lacking Trump's dubious gifts for chaos and mayhem, will not try to reignite the spent magic of Trumpism especially after the 2020 election proved in spades that it didn't even work for Trump. Yes, Trump got 10,000,000 more idiots to vote for him than in 2016 but Biden's equally dubious appeal, and the panic of another four years of the unofficial 4th Reich, brought out 13,000,000 more Biden voters than Hillary Clinton had four years ago. Plus, Biden broke through the so-called Midwestern "firewall" of battleground states that Trump had "won" in 2016.

    It's far likelier that establishment Republicans will seek to recapture their equilibrium, clear their house of their one night stand's empty Diet Coke cans and Big Mac wrappers and try to reclaim their tattered, shit-smeared dignity in a post-Trump life. They will go back to good old conservatism that had served them and their predecessors in good stead- Attacking and occupying countries full of brown-skinned people, deregulating polluting industries and giving massive tax breaks to those least deserving of them.

    And, in the last two instances, they got just that from Trump, which was the only reason why the aforementioned establishment Republicans tolerated him for as long as they had these past four years.

    So, while Republican Uncle Fester loses one case after another and has evidentiary hearings canceled by judges, as aggrieved MAGAts are faced with losing their boy and having dangerous temper tantrums, as Lindsey Graham illegally meddles in the election with the industry of a Vladimir Putin, the government will creak onward in its ceaseless quest for self-preservation. Our Constitution, our democracy, our way of life and our very national security is at risk without a peaceful transfer of power.

    The Pentagon is faced with the prospect of actually briefing the incoming Biden administration on the sly like a drug deal in a back alley, or the purchasing of PPE during the pandemic. Hopefully, the nation's top health experts will follow suit and brief the president-elect. Maybe he'll be briefed by Trump's latest fired officials.

     Then, after one administration creaks and squeals into being like a rusty machine fighting against an army of destructive chimps, then Donald Trump will be relegated not merely to the ash heap of history but beneath it.