by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Just a brief glance at Twitter this evening proves I was right about what’s going on with the Cyber Ninjas’ “audit” of the Maricopa County election results. The Right’s bullshit echo chamber has already established a baseline of “we may never know” who really won the 2020 election. That’s just the basics of the talking points Cyber Ninjas hope to provide the cocksuckers of the MAGA New Right.
I’m sure in the far dark reaches of the MAGA New Right echo chamber, someone, somewhere is deciding that the only solution to this “proof” that Trump “won” Arizona is for MAGA state legislatures to hold conventions to see if they can “nullify” the Biden Administration. What will start off as simple magical political thinking — a joke — will quickly spread like wildfire throughout the MAGA New Right echo chamber.
As I’ve written before, one of two things will then happen. Either there will be a huge push for just enough other states to do the same sort of “audit” to prove that Trump “really won” and then we either see a demand for Trump to be named Speaker when Republicans inevitably flip the House in 2022 or we flip that stage and we go straight to the nullification crisis.
If we go the nullification route now, the crisis would have the same dynamic as what happened on January 6th. Trump and his toadies would see these “nullification” conventions as a source of ready grift cash and they would say a lot of provocative things to the base not thinking through the implications of what they were saying.
Once the bolts started popping off the Union when these “nullification conventions” become “secession conventions” a lot of the people who make up the rock solid core of the MAGA New Right base would have a pretty huge existential crisis — do they stay with the Union government or do they jump ship to any sort of putative Trumpandia rebel government? I can think of about a dozen who would make that final plunge, but the momentum would have to be pretty powerful for folks like Mike Pompeo or Tom Cotton to risk their future presidential careers by leaving the Union altogether.
Which, come to think of it, would produce a rather comical cleaving between the MAGA New Right people who proved they were willing to drink the political Koolaid and “kill” themselves on a political level within traditional American politics, and those who weren’t. Depending on who won any such civil war, you might even have a surprising number of MAGA New Right people attempt to act like nothing happened after the U.S. Military crushed Trumplandia.
But that is extremely speculative. It could be the US will just Balkanize and there really won’t be any set endgame to any civil war that began.
And, yet, even THAT is extremely speculative. It could be that this entire bullshit audit is nothing more than a talking point for the next four years and the main event will be in the late 2024 – early 2025 timeframe.
Just can’t game things out at the moment. Too many variables that could go either way.
