Saturday, December 12, 2020

Will Americans follow Trump back to civil war?


t seems not even unequivocal rejection--twice--by the US Supreme Court  is enough to convince Donald Trump he can no longer be dictator beyond January 20, 2021.  Within hours he was back on Twitter slamming the Supreme Court for "lacking wisdom and courage" to install him as president as a matter of arbitrary gift.
   He had abandoned all pretensions of protesting the election results. He just wanted the whole election itself discarded and the office of the president awarded to him by judicial decree.
    The US Supreme Court refused. Now he wants individual state legislatures to appoint electors who would vote for Trump in the electoral college--regardless of the actual election result in their states. He is fairly realistic though, he did not call for all fifty states to do it, just four: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin---battle ground states where he lost to Joe Biden.  But since those states are not minded to do that, he got one state--Texas--to file suit against these four seeking to compel them to do it by mandatory injunction. 
    It is a laughable legal theory--one state complaining about how another state conducts its own affairs. That the Supreme Court rejected the attempt is a no-brainer.
   Now true constitutionalists are worried he might try to resurrect his dead-and-embalmed "massive electoral fraud complaint" on the floor of the Electoral College. That's not possible. 
   The Electoral College is not an actual assembly, it's a political construct. On a common date--this time it is December 14--the electors of each state would meet in their respective state capitals to cast their votes for President. So there's not a single venue where all these electors unionwide would be present in the same room participating in one common session. There will be fifty sessions held in fifty different venues. Thus it is  impossible to disrupt all fifty proceedings at the same time to derail the voting.  
    Except for a handful of states, the general policy is to award all the electoral votes of each state to the candidate who won the popular vote. This means  the electors will be casting their votes based on the official results certified by the board of election supervisors in each state. Those results have been finalized and "locked in" last December 8--the so-called "safe harbor date." Beyond that date no more protests against those results could be instituted.
    In other words, Donald Trump can no longer change the results. What he can try to do is to block the submission of those results to the electoral colleges. That was the first Supreme Court case, when a Republican lawsuit in Pennsylvania wanted to delay the certification until enough votes could be shaved off Biden's lead through multiple recounts, each recount cycle using a different Biden vote filter. Unfortunately, the "case" was a non-starter because it was aborted right at fetal stage by the US Supreme Court refusing to give it due course.
    The nine justices who voted unanimously to throw out the first case did not even bother to explain. There was nothing to explain. Technically, they did not even issue a Decision--only something called a "minute resolution" which was not authored by any justice. It was a single sentence written by a Supreme Court record clerk after reading the minutes of an en banc session wherein one item in the agenda was the nine justices agreeing to toss out the case. That was recorded  in the minutes of the session. So the one-page one-sentence document thwarting the case was just a reporting out of that particular agenda item.
     It would have been more sporting for the Supreme Court to have, at least, said to Trump, "What part of NO don't you understand?"
     Evidently, the Supreme Court must have surmised that Donald Trump's answer even to a rhetorical question like that would have been, "All of it. I don't understand ALL of it."
    This is evident from after being flatly denied his ambition to have multiple-cycle recounts, Donald Trump's think-tank came up with a novel new concept: let's forget recount. Let's just pick the winner from any point along the contest where Donald Trump  was still ahead in the game.  So they sought to have the four states who innovated on their voting procedures to make COVID-19 wary voters avail of mailed-in ballots, in effect,  WAIVE their election. 
    For those who are not lawyers, the best analogy is this: let's say NBA Team One beat NBA Team Two, with the final score being 120-100.  But let's suppose Team One was actually trailing by ten points late in the Third Quarter and only rallied in the Fourth Quarter to win.  Trump's second Supreme Court case is saying, "No, wait, let's proclaim the team that was ahead in the Third Quarter as the Champion!"
By throwing out the election results from the four battleground states because those results were heavily determined by mailed-in ballots--the fourth quarter scoring rally of Joe Biden--Trump wants to be declared winner as of election evening, when less than forty percent of the ballots cast unionwide have been canvassed. 
     Do you know why?
    Donald Trump does. All year long poll after poll have pegged his "base" at less than forty percent of general respondentship. That's  why his consistent approval rating for four years had always been below 35 percent.  This means if he was winning when only less than forty percent of votes have been counted, that's the best it could ever get for him. It can never get any better from there. Stop the counting right there!
    Of course, they didn't stop counting--they couldn't. So when the Biden rally came in the fourth quarter, all Donald Trump could see were torrents of Biden votes, relentlessly coming in wave after wave. He called them "dumps." 
    Game over? Not for Trump! After all, even if a team has won the championship, so long as they have not been handed the trophy, the confetti and colored balloons have not dropped from the ceiling, there is no champion yet. In Trump's mind, if I didn't score more points, I'll shave points from the opponent. If I can't shave points from the opponent, I'll pull the plug from the P.A. system so the results can't be announced. If I can't pull the plug from the P.A. system, I'll try to stop the awarding ceremonies. If I can't stop the awarding ceremonies, I'll tackle the guy bringing the trophy up the stage to the ground...
  So now Donald Trump's coterie of walking brain donors are thinking of resurrecting his "massive electoral fraud" narrative on the floor of Congress when it meets to receive the report of votes from the electoral colleges on January 6, 2021. Again that would be futile because Congress is not an election administering body. It's not even a vote counting body. And it is not an election protest court. All the US Constitution empowers Congress to do is consolidate the reports submitted by the electoral colleges, do a simple arithmetic comparison of the electoral votes received by Donald Trump and Joe Biden and see who got more than 270.
    Donald Trump vowed that he would never concede. Unfortunately, nobody cares if he concedes or not. He lost. He cannot "un-lose" by not conceding.
    What is worrisome is not Donald Trump himself, but the cult of political zombies behind him--the better part of 74-million voters, although it is highly doubtful if the monolith is really that big in practical terms.  The average voter gets back in his or her life the day after the election--it is a scant few who can hold on to their unrighteous indignation for longer than a few days. But even if only 35 percent  of the combined popular vote were to continue to blindly follow Donald Trump, that would still be a mind-boggling number, around 54-million. That number is still more than the population of half the member states of the United Nations. 
     The question then becomes no longer, Can Trump hold on to his so-called "base" but rather would he be bold enough to create a "Trump country" out of it? The spectre of a post-modern secession crisis is the most peacful scenario Americans could hope for. If these 54-million Trump zombies all lived in say ten or so contiguous states, all you have is a clamor for secession. It's a geographical issue, easily solved by military versus militia channeling the historical battles between Union and Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. 
     The problem is, these 54 million are dispersed throughout the 50 states, no doubt more densely in some states than others. But a confrontation between elements of the dispersed 54-million and the rest of the general population would be the TRUE CIVIL WAR in the sense of civilian-versus-civilian. There would be no localized flash points, but a frightening federation-wide free-for-all which could yet be the bloodiest internal conflagration in modern political history.
     And you'd never think it would happen n the United States of America. All it takes is a selfish, narcissistic, sycophant like Donald Trump who has demonstrated that he can short-circuit the normally indomitable instinct of self-preservation and lead millions of Americans literally to their deaths in COVID-19 ignorance.
     If he can lead throngs of Americans to ignore mortal danger and refuse to wear a facemask--and especially be defiantly proud to do it--what can stop him from leading them to internal ideology-less revolt? 
    The most frightening question to ask therefore is, will enough Americans follow Donald Trump to Civil War?
      My answer is YES.Ⓒ 2020 Joel R. Dizon
 
NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON


Friday, December 4, 2020

DIY phenomenon reinventing itself

ot all clowns are shallow. P.T. Barnum, he of Barnum and Bailey circus fame, said the staggeringly candid words,
“I don't care what the newspapers say about me as long as they spell my name right.”

   Although disputed to some measure, he is also credited with coining the phrase "There's a sucker born every minute."

   Who would think it would be this quintessential clown that would utter words to befuddle political scientists trying to deconstruct this post-modern philosophy of exotic right-wing populism exemplified by ex-US president Donald Trump?

   If you were to summarize the Trumpian political school of thought, these two statements pretty much get the job done. They are not statements of principle. They are statements of mechanics on how to carry out any principle, but especially one that might normally be greeted with scorn or contempt by civil society.

   Donald Trump has discovered--indeed, pretty much invented--the idea that being wrong is nothing to apologize for. In fact, it is productive to wear your mistakes on your sleeve, and to challenge the community norm not for the sake of challenging it per se but with the view to supplanting those norms with his own standards of deviancy.   

   It's a paradox of hypocritical reality that of the many evangelical churches that rabidly support Donald Trump, none of them would vote for him to become senior pastor of their congregation. Only a scant few of them might even embrace him as a regular member. They just want him for the fact that he is their battering ram in advancing religious freedom by doing to society what they don't like society to do to them, namely imposing their own moral and behavioral ethos.

   Donald Trump woke up one morning realizing the same thing, and in multiple applications. Why denounce racism when you can argue that those who call you racist are racists? And just like that you have achieved parity with them. Why express remorse over having a wild orgy with a streetwalker named Desire when you can wink conspicuously in public and remind America the kind of society it mostly is: puritans in public, perverts in private. Fornication is everyone's sin, but so long as he shouts family values and pro-life platitudes, the wool is quickly pulled over everyone's eyes. Have no shame, no sensitivity, no empathy, no love for decency and no regrets about it--only hubris that, in time, enough people would perceive as courage to be "only human" and to be "honest" about it.  Donald Trump discovered that, too: if you are honest about your crime, people no longer see the crime--just the honesty in him owning up to it.

   Take his personal war against "electoral fraud."  What electoral fraud? The one he says exists, whether it can be proven or not. It is not about whether he can prove there was electoral fraud, it's all  about being to make enough people feel that way. The measure by which the conventional conservative American demographic embraces that lie is dumbfounding: over $270-million dollars in donations to his "Electoral Defense Fund." The Trump campaign has collected that much  in less than 30 days since announcing that his "Elite Legal Strike Force"  would clamber  all the way up the US Supreme Court with the simple petition: to overturn the election results--lock, stock and barrel. 

   Forget Joe Biden, he will have the whole US government machinery helping him implement his national reconstruction agenda shortly. What is of greater concern is what the American body politic, always left to its own devices under any admnistration, will do.

   The Republicans have demonstrated they will mostly let the national ballast pull the ship of state level, without effort or intervention--certainly without apology, too. The Democrats are having to contend with the familiar unwieldiness of success having so many fathers. Promising to assemble a Cabinet that would "look like America" Joe Biden is having to placate every under-represented interest group that helped propel him to the Whitehouse. 
 
   In this slightly different fog of war,  Donald Trump is already well ahead in terms of future planning. He has talked about a second presidential run in four years and is looking to lock in his vaunted 74-million voter base. He hopes to   preserve, maybe even grow  his so-called "base" all the way up to November 2024.

   In the first place, having 74-million Americans vote for any candidate is about as meaningful as saying 74-million Americans drink Gatorade, or use Preparation H. It's a snapshot of one day's behavior, not a personal mission statement. Mostly it is Trump's detractors that read too much out of this raw statistic. To be sure, it's not the first time they have done so and in the process revived, or even willed into existence, other groups that were will-o-the-wisps till they found a de-exorcised political body to possess.  Some examples include the Proud Boys, Bikers for Trump, Border Patrol Agents for Trump, Fraternal Order of Police for Trump--and a long list of other groups "for Trump."   

   Trump didn't found any of them, they founded themselves after realizing that Trump may be a swear word in Democratic circles but it's a very fashionable brand.  Your group could be composed of ten aimless sycophants in the fringes, but one mention in a Trump tweet and suddenly your are a local franchise. Reprint the Trump quote on a silkscreened t-shirt, start passing out membership forms and collecting club dues and you're well on your way to being an affiliate group of "the base."

   Trump's tweets are nothing intellectual--or even borderline mature. What makes them earthshaking and consequential is the fact that they are read by 89-million followers. Though the number is falling fast  since he lost the election--and even at its peak ranks far below Barack Obama's 126-million followers--that number does not represent his base.  Judging by the evenly balanced number of likes and hates of his tweets it's logical to assume that the 89-million people who follow Trump on Tweeter represents the combined number of people who follow him out of fealty and those simply curious what outlandish thing he would say next.

   The greatest tragedy is not for Trump to believe his own myth, and to regard his personal legend as a fact, but that his detractors do.  Among Republicans, those facing public reevaluation in the upcoming 2022 midterm elections are wary  of stepping on Trump's toes. They fear his calling down fire and brimstone on their campaign--something he abjectly failed to do against Joe Biden. In other words, Donald Trump is telling his fellow Republicans, what hurt I couldn't inflict on the Democrats I can unleash on you, my fellow Republicans--and they respond by sucking up to him? Isn't life a mystery.

   On the other hand,  the Democrats talk about making the Biden adminstration the "opposite of Trump."  Naivete knows no bounds. What makes them think the Republican-controlled (now, it seems) House would not file an impeachment case against Joe Biden? And if by unfortunate happenstance, the Republicans end up controlling the Senate, that they would not convict Joe Biden out of respect for him not trying to be "like Trump?"

   Ultimately, it will be the American people directly that would have to deal with the Trump phenomenon, if the national consensus was that a return to Trump politics would be anathema to the vision of the Founding Fathers. Just like it took the American people directly to unseat Trump, despite his stranglehold on the workings of Washington's realpolitik.    

   Twitter and Facebook--non-government entities both--have indicated that Donald Trump could lose his social media accounts when he is no longer POTUS. After all, ordinary netizens that flaunt their policies against circulating deceitful material get the axe posthaste.  Without his information umbilical to his base, Trump could no longer keep interest level high on himself and his personal dogma. With receding followership comes donor fatigue. Once the tap dries, Trump's political action committee's self-promoting programs would grind to a halt.

   None of the major traditional news networks (CNN, ABC, NBC, MS-NBC, C-Span) carried  Trump's 46-minute post-defeat delusional rant videotaped without media participation--but it still found accommodation among the far right media Fox News, Newsmax and OAN, along with a motley of smaller garage studios. Now the true reckoning between traditional news organizations and FAKE NEWS  can finally be undertaken in earnest. Now that Trump is no longer president, no longer with a hot line to the heads of the Commerce Department, the IRS, the DOJ and other federal regulators that strike fear in the hearts of the business community, even media advertising will return to the fold of free-enterprise dynamics. Sponsors will advertise in media outfits they feel are legitimate. They don't have to do it anyore to score points with the Whitehouse. Eventually, true costs of operation and true measures of revenue will render fake news operations unviable signalling the renaissance of truth in journalism.

   Because of all of this, Donald Trump and the usual boatload of enabling characters around him are busy trying to reinvent Donald Trump. He needs to go back to "victim status" because overbearing authoritarian doesn't suit him anymore.  But the appeal of appearing to still "call the shots" will be irresistible for him. Look to him to do a parallel of everything Joe Biden does. He will deliver his own "State of the Union" address right after Biden's, maintan an active "press bureau" that will issue statements of him bearing down on every issue that captivates the American attention. In short, from merely fantasizing the concept, Donald Trump will look to literally live the reality of running a "Deep State" from outside the state.

   To do that he needs to push the envelop of what could be lawfully done. He will, no doubt, break rules and ignore sanctions. He never cared for any of that when he was president charged with upholding those rules, why would he care about it now? This is why he talks about pardoning himself by a concept he might end up inventing: pre-emptive pardon.  The US Constitution says that the president is immune from prosecution while in office. The phrase "while in office"  is a very important distinction because it divides time into two phases: a phase when the president could not be charged with a felony, and a phase when he could. If Donald Trump succeeds in inventing the concept of pre-emptive pardon--meaning he can continue to enjoy immunity from prosecution even after he leaves office, he would have amended  the US Constitution as easily as that without even changing a single word in it.

   Unless America catches on, of course. Ⓒ 2020 Joel R. Dizon  

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON


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