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.

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