by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
The curious thing about Trump is if he had any native political acumen, he would have done a major autocratic move at some point between October and just after the election. That would have likely goaded the Blue States into leaving the Union. He could, in turn, have put down such a revolt and reorganized them in his own MAGA image.
But he didn’t.
And now that he’s waited this long, his autocratic options have grown far more limited. And, yet, there’s a serious risk that once his absolute unwillingness meets his absolute realization that he lost, that his mind may lock up and he’ll go bonkers.
Because, I really don’t see any way he “crosses the Rubicon” and takes “total control” via martial law. There’s just no way he can do it. I guess he could start a war with the DPRK or Iran and try to pull a fast one on us. But it seems more likely that if he is really surrounded by crackpots and kooks that they’re going to drift towards the obvious: him going transactional on Twitter. Specifically, he may begin to demand that Red States leave the Union.
He would say that he’s the rightful president and those states who agree with him need to leave the Union. He might flee Washington for good and hold up somewhere while he goads Red States to leave the Union via conventions. He can probably get a huge swath of Red States in the central part of the country to do so because they’re white. But they have small populations and small economies, so while there would be significant political violence that would be called a “second American civil war” it wouldn’t be until the states of the old CSA got into the act that things would get lit.
But, as I keep saying, the black community simply isn’t going to allow old CSA states to leave the Union and all Southern whites will get for their trouble is a race war.
Such sedition would happen in the context of Trump finally losing his mind. I’ve long debated if Trump would “implode” or “explode” mentally in the end. It definitely looks as though he’s heading towards the latter.
As such, Republicans will face their final test — do they support Trump’s sedition or do they at last cut him loose? It seems this will be a real existential test for Republicans because at some point their absolute fidelity to Trump and his MAGA base will bump up against the cold hard fact that his behavior is, at last, absolutely indefensible and he’s a liability to their own political futures.
So, the split between people who lulz this and those who can’t take the final crazy train to sedition might — at least for one political cycle — destroy the Republican Party.
But there’s a huge caveat to all of this — since Trump isn’t an autocrat but a ding-dong, he could just, well, do nothing. He might rant a lot on Twitter, but he never finally goes transactional. He never finally takes the last step that would destroy the Republican Party.
Trump is so unpredictable — and so easy to overestimate — that we’ve still got some time before which direction he is going to go becomes obvious. But the closer we get to January 6th, the closer we come to knowing one way or another.
Once we get past the January 6th meeting of Congress, we’re going to know not only Trump’s fate, but our own.
