No, alas, that means it's just beginning. Let's begin with the election, since it was an election like no other. An army of Trump followers raged against the system, led by our toddler president. They raged against Biden and his followers over supposed Democratic cheating. The Trumpkins continue to rage, screaming and demonstrating to "Stop the Steal." One Trump supporter interviewed by MSNBC was convinced that a steady stream of Biden ballots was coming in from China. The Trumkins would not have raged so if Donald Trump himself had not issued a constant stream of rage from his Twitter account. To call Donald Trump a racist misses the point. Our wholly narcissistic president hates with a deadly passion anyone who does not love him, and is pleased to embrace anyone who does. But the love must be absolute, and use no judgement to suggest that the Donald might be in error. Ever.
Trump once smilingly told a group of reporters that “I always win,” so when the Democrats began pumping voter turnout by pushing mail-in ballots in the period prior to the election, he screamed foul and prepared to challenge the outcome. Many a reporter had asked him if he would accept the election result — a question never posed to a sitting president before Trump. Aside from coy evasions, the best answer we got was "If I win." That should have been a clue; always take Donald Trump at his word — he is pure narcissist. He can't stand to be a loser. So when all those votes were counted, and Joe Biden had won both a popular and Electoral College victory, Donald Trump's retainers and fans put the country through five weeks of litigation and demonstration hell. His lawyers were thrown out of every courtroom they dared enter, though not the US Supreme Court. Those Justices dismissed his petition out of hand, refusing to hear his case. An even sillier case by the fawning Texas Attorney General who claimed states that didn't run their elections just like the Lone Star State were somehow harming Texans didn't get any farther, though the fawning Justice Alito thought maybe the court should hear it.
The President's most popular conspiracy clown was an attorney named Sidney Powell, who was happy to go on any radio or television show that would have her, making the most outrageous claims. Those claims then went into circulation in the conservative media bloodstream, where they became truth, even after they'd been thrown out of court. The claims were surreal: The voting machines used in many states had been programmed in Venezuela; they changed Trump votes to Biden ones automatically; they could be hacked by a fifteen year old; they transmitted their votes to Germany for counting; the list went on. A former Chief of Staff of the US Air Force claimed to know for certain that US soldiers had been killed assaulting a CIA base in Germany where the votes had been transmitted. The number of nut cases aligned with Donald Trump seemed (and still seems) endless. There was and still is no end to Republican conspiracy theories. Those conspiracy theories will endure and multiply for the next four years. The only one we won't see is that Joe Biden was born in Kenya. There was a day not long ago when Americans were shocked that a man in North Carolina would hop in his car with several weapons and drive to Washington DC to investigate a story about child sex trafficking at a pizzeria. And further that he would burst into the pizzeria without consulting the police, ready to shoot the place up, expecting to find a former first lady as the head exploiter. Such times and conspiracies seem a bit quaint.
How do we know our election nightmare is only almost over? Early this morning President Donald Trump tweeted: “Many Trump votes were routed to Biden,” and then: “This Fake Election can no longer stand. Get moving Republicans.” We know that the President is hoping Congress will hand him the election by fiat on 6 January when it meets to affirm the Electoral College vote. But he expected the Supreme Court to hand him the election two days ago. This is a president who has seen his power strangely limited over the past four years. He was likely most content when declaring a national emergency to seize funds from the Defense Appropriations Bill to build his border wall. From that there was little appeal. His attempt to ban immigration from select Muslim countries was a fiasco, as was the attempt to end DACA. The last should have been easy, since it was created by am executive order, but those pesky courts got in the way. It now appears that Donald Trump might actually lose this one.
But what of the interim period, that time prior to Joe Biden's inauguration? Clearly seventy-million people and over a hundred congressmen are delusional on the electoral vote. Will the President count on their support to do something bold? Start a war or declare martial law? It is not out of the question. He cannot brook being a loser. And Donald Trump has two things that no other president before him has had — his own private army of thugs, the Proud Boys, who will come out for him in any city he requests, and a huge body of fans willing to show up for demonstrations most anywhere. Never before has a president commanded a fandom such as these. Further, Trump could start a regional war, or simply declare martial law in order to keep the White House. It all seems so third world, but so does the legal maneuvering over the last five weeks.
Next we'll look at the remains. Two hollowed out political parties pick over the bones of a once great country. The fact is, it always looks better than it really is. If you want to study examples, study the Roman and British Empires. What is not clear is how the Republican Party lost its entire moral fabric so quickly.
