I know how it is. You're sitting there watching Trump refuse to concede, file lawsuits over nonexistent voting fraud, do weird shit with the military and intelligence leadership, and more, and you're thinking, "What the fuck is he up to?" And then you read things that tell you to shit yourself in terror and other things telling you to chill the fuck out. And then you're watching reports on how Bill Barr is telling the Justice Department to investigate even suspected "irregularities" in voting, not even those that are crimes, and you're thinking, "Okay, now what the fuck is up with this?" And then you read things telling you to shit yourself in terror and other things telling you to chill the fuck out. And then you're watching Republicans specifically refuse to say or outright deny that Joe Biden won the election. And then you read things that tell you to shit yourself in terror and other things telling you to chill the fuck out.
It's like living inside a panic attack on meth.
Well, let me put your mind at ease. It's okay. Relax. It's totally okay to shit yourself over what's going on. In fact, it's entirely logical. Embrace the shitting yourself. If the last five years have taught us anything, it's that those who don't shit themselves are the ones who are embarrassed. If you turn out to be Chicken Little, well, the worst that could happen is that the sky didn’t fall.
Obviously, a huge part of Trump's intransigence on the election results is he can continue the grift he's been running since June 2015. He's raising money on this supposedly mighty effort to take down those demonic Democrats and complicit Republicans who didn't let poll watchers stand as close as they wanted to the ballot counters or whatever the fuck the nonsensical lawsuits are saying. Except, of course, we know that the money is mostly going to retire Trump's campaign debt and to fund a new PAC for all things in the Trumpish future. There are reports that Trump's going to announce that he's a candidate for the presidency in 2024, perhaps by the end of December, in time for a full four years of campaigning and rallies to look forward to. Why do that? Because then Trump gets to keep raising money and, more importantly, living off that money by having, say, a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser when he's there for the weekend. Hey, had to fly the private jet there. Expense that to the campaign. He gets to keep filtering funds to his shitty properties. End the election, end the campaign, and you close the spigot.
But, you might be thinking, Trump can be conning the rubes out of cash while tearing down democracy. And that's the rub, isn't it? Sure, we can look at his recent upheaval in the Defense Department and decide that he's settling scores or allowing some people to pump up their resumes. But then there's the idea that he's seeking to release information related to the Mueller probe because he thinks it will prove Russia didn't help him get elected in 2016, so he wants a declassifying spree, consequences be damned. And then there's the certainly not-impossible idea that he wants the military to help him stay in power, something that is so not-impossible that General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, felt compelled to say in a speech on Wednesday, "We do not take an oath to a king or a queen, a tyrant or a dictator. We do not take an oath to an individual. No, we do not take an oath to a country, a tribe or religion. We take an oath to the Constitution." Yeah, that had to be said out loud.
Of course, there are other reasons that Trump and too many in the GOP are willing to trash the election results besides overturning them. Beyond the cash grab, Trump is a vengeful twatmite, and he likely wants to damage Joe Biden as much as possible just to be a dick and, also, to set him up for that 2024 run. At the very least, this effort creates an air of illegitimacy for the Biden administration that Republicans can ride into the midterms and 2024. It has the bonus of giving Mitch McConnell even more power, if the GOP happens to keep the Senate, and, honestly, even if it doesn't. Shit, half the country will believe from the get-go that McConnell is the only non-corrupt leader in DC. That's enough to induce the vomit-shits.
Or maybe it's just a prelude to Trump starting his own right-wing nutzoid network. He's can do his idiot rallies and not be responsible for the lives and deaths of the people in this nation. Anything is fucking possible right now.
But this is as much an information war as it is anything else, and one of the purposes in pressing on with all of this shit, unlikely as it is to succeed, may just be to lay the groundwork for stealing the election. Again, that's nearly impossible. Yet...
Almost all the experts telling us to chill out now told us in 2016 that Trump couldn't possibly win. And he did. They told us that he wouldn't do his Muslim ban or enact or try to enact the cruel policies he campaigned on. And he did. I spoke face-to-face with one of the prominent Never-Trump members of the Lincoln Project in 2017, and he assured me that Trump wouldn't last through 2018 because his sources said the intelligence community would take him down. Everyone was fucking wrong. And he wasn't even destroyed enough to lose in a landslide in 2020. They all thought that Republicans would be somehow noble and stand up to Trump. They were blinded by their own bullshit.
And I keep coming back to the idea that Trump really didn't want to win in 2016, that it was a big shock to him that he did. Yeah, he just bumblefucked into that.
This is a way of saying that all these supposed impossibilities are overcome by a compliant GOP and courts filled with lackeys. And right now, 70% of Republicans say they don't believe the election was "free and fair," with 78% buying into the lie about fraud through mail-in voting. Often, the easiest way to understand Trump is that he's saying exactly what he means. He's not fucking around about the election being "rigged" and filled with "illegal votes." He believes it, and he's acting accordingly, and that, at the end of the day, the Republicans who say that this is just one of his toddler tantrums and let him get over it are as complicit as those who are actively supporting him. The longer that this goes on, the longer Biden's transition is postponed, the more that his armies of MAGA cretins intensify their belief that their orange master has been the victim of socialist traitors. That leads to chaos, and Trump just gets off on that shit.
So, yeah, it's fine to have a wave of anxiety wash over you when you hear about the General Services Administration's Emily Murphy refusing to recognize Biden's win so he can have funding and information access to get ready to be president. It's fine to think even if all this fuckery may not have a plan behind it, it sure as shit is giving off the air of a coup. And then it's fine to feel nauseous when you think about that term, "coup," as a real world, a real your world, occurrence. Don't let anyone take away your fear right now. Fuck that.
Be ready for the knife twist, which totally might not happen. But it totally could. And we need to recognize that it's fucked up that we're even at a point where we can contemplate that and not sound completely mad. That's how much damage has already been done.
One final note: It's beyond insane, beyond enraging that we have to worry about any of this shit when the country is being wrecked by the coronavirus.
