The Bloody Road Back to Mar a Lago

 

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

“These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!” Trump, January 6, 2021.

The riot in the nation's Capitol 17 days ago that had directly and indirectly resulted in the deaths of seven human beings, that we know of, was the final example of Trump's utter worthlessness as a Commander in Chief. The first global-scale challenge of his leadership skills and his entire administration was, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic. And, 413,000+ dead Americans later (Enough to fill Arlington National Cemetery all over again), we know how well Trump faced that crisis.

    The most dramatic imagining of the last fortnight of the Trump administration would have been of a bunkered president, let's charitably call him, as huge chunks of the White House fall down around him, bombs going off in the near distance, aides screaming in his face as he's paralyzed with indecision to show leadership or blaming him for the destruction of the nation's Capitol and our governmental infrastructure. Then, finally, a Secret Service agent unholsters his sidearm, points it at Trump's head and delivers a not so tender mercy.

 

     The truth wasn't very dissimilar from that dystopian tableau. Trump, his mental state's deterioration obvious even from behind closed doors in the final hours of his pre-Twitter ban for life, had planned for sedition long before January 6^th. We knew what he was planning and we silently and impotently dreaded that day, the day Vice President Pence was to certify Joe Biden's legal election. Some of us even gave him the benefit of the doubt. And hundreds of thousands, if not millions, licked their chops and rubbed their hands at the prospect of the mayhem to come. Tens of thousands streamed into Washington's Ellipse like red-topped lemmings, quivering for the slightest possible sign of Dear Leader, literally, giving them their marching orders.

     They got them. 41 minutes later, the Capitol building was sacked. Five people were dead by the end of the day. At least two more would later commit suicide over the riot, including a veteran police officer. Congressional and Senate offices and conferences rooms were trashed and ransacked. Human fecal matter was on the marble floor then smeared on the walls, files were rifled through on the Senate floor and copied on cell phones. Hundreds would be arrested over the coming weeks and charged with federal crimes.

     Not one got a pardon from Trump in his final night in the White House. That was never part of the plan. Trump professed to "love" them in a video filmed during the riot that he, his family and minions had caused but pardoning them was never part of the plan. He used them as cannon fodder, human countermeasures, to deflect the mortars from getting anywhere close to him. To his final seconds of his so-called "presidency", Trump never came closer to admitting responsibility for the carnage than he had admitted that Joe Biden beat him fair and square.

     During the siege, very few people had access to Trump. In the small private dining area adjoining the Oval Office (The same one that Trump would falsely claim Obama used to watch basketball games in during working hours when he'd host the occasional impromptu tour during working hours), Trump was too busy watching the riots on TV and getting excited by what he saw. He'd excoriated his own staff for not being more excited by the chaos and mayhem.

     The physical infrastructure was literally being torn to pieces by an enraged mob over electoral and voter fraud that simply didn't exist on the other end of the National Mall but Trump seemed not to care. In the Capitol Building, to where the violence was directed by a panicked and desperate Donald John Trump, there wasn't a single human in that hallowed huge building, including his own vice president, the sickeningly servile Mike Pence, that he gave a shit about. As was the case for his entire sociopathic life, the only human being, let's, again, charitably call him, on the entire planet that he cared about was himself.

The Road to Mar a Lago Moment

 

“You would think the news that five people died in a riot of your own making would scare you straight, but no, it was when one of his favorite media outlets turned on him that he finally realized the trouble he was facing.” -A Republican WH insider

Few of us have that proverbial "road to Damascus" epiphany, that moment of clarity when a previously elusive truth finally reveals itself to one in a divine revelation that literally alters one's life. The phrase comes, of course, from the Bible and it describes the conversion to Christianity of the Apostle Paul as he was literally on the road to Damascus. However, with Donald Trump and self-revelations, one should always manage their expectations. Because Trump's own epiphany that came, fittingly, the day after Epiphany Day was limited and turned back, again, on him personally.

     Just hours after the riot, The Wall Street Journal, the right wing daily that had stood by him through the worst of his excesses and crimes, called for Congress to impeach Trump for the second time. Six days later, Congress obliged. That was Trump's road to Damascus moment, his one great revelation. When the reliably right wing WSJ was lost, Trump realized he'd lost much of his Republican establishment support. To Trump, it must have been akin to Lyndon Johnson realizing after listening to Walter Cronkite on one fateful night in February 1968, that he'd lost Middle America.

     But Trump's concerns weren't over a wrong-headed war disguised as a police action but one in which he was alarmed he personally had lost support with a very major right wing outlet. Even Trump wouldn't dare publicly take on the Wall Street Journal as he shamelessly had CNN, MSNBC and the New York Times. Instead, he retreated more deeply into his psychological bunker to lick wounds he'd never legitimately sustained.

     A few tweets, a couple of pathetic, deflated videos later and he was erased like magic by Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and, later, several other Twitter accounts he'd commandeered and his Youtube channel. They were, ironically, the same exact social media corporations that had treated him with such deference over the last five and a half years from whom he'd demanded to strip of their Section 230 legal protection in a recent military spending bill that he'd petulantly vetoed and that Congress had overridden on New Years, a first for Trump.

     As many of us had suspected, deprived of his bully pulpit and his gang that used to unconditionally be at his back, Trump the bully wasn't so tough, after all. The only relevance he'd wielded in his final days in office was a poorly-organized mob of rabid supporters who were now on the run, getting arrested, fired from their jobs, forced to resign office, suspended and slapped with federal charges.

     As it had turned out, the Big Bad Wolf was toothless and no one was afraid of him any more. Donald John Trump had tried syndicating his madness through a violent mob of vandals and semi human right wing activists and had failed miserably. The Wall Street Journal's editorial board said so and they called for his unprecedented second impeachment. And there was nothing he could do about it. The corporations, who own us all to one degree or another, showed Donald Trump, and us, who was really boss. And the bully was sent back home with tears in his eyes, hatching murky plans for vengeance known only to him and his inner demons.