by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
What makes Trump so dangerous is he keeps being himself when it comes to the sham Cyber Ninjas “audit” of the 2020 Arizona presidential election results, which leads you to wonder if something like a far worse version of January 6th could happen because of it.
That’s the thing about Trump and January 6th — he had absolutely no idea what the endgame for his ranting would be. He’s not smart enough to do the basic autocratic plays necessary to pull off an actual coup, so he just ranted about the Big Lie in abstract terms.
So, Trump and his toadies went through all this trouble to see if they could get Pence to not certify the election, but they didn’t really think through the political or historical consequences of their actions. There was no guile, at least on Trump’s part. His January 6th machinations were little more than a very stupid political grunt.
Trump suggests he’ll be returned to office following state-level audits of the 2020 election (he won’t be returned to office) pic.twitter.com/K2hOpfvqr9
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 24, 2021
The same thing with what’s going on with Cyber Ninjas in Arizona. Trump knows he wants to become president as quickly as possible — even if it means destroying the country in the process — but he’s a spoil little brat and thinks if he just uses The Secret enough that the law of attraction will make it happen. And, so, the rest of us are left wondering what’s going to happen.
To date, nothing has happened.
But Trump has begun to talk in concrete terms about the “decertification” of election results in states across the country and he honestly thinks he’s going to be “reinstated” because of such bullshit, even though it’s not, in anyway, possible.
And, as such, my prediction that we could go from “decertification” to “nullification” to “secession” seems a fair bet for a possible near future crisis.
But there’s a hitch.
On paper, it definitely seems as though my dystopian civil war scenario is possible. But at the same time, for such a thing to happen, Trump would have to not only go transaction in a concrete way, but Republicans in critical states would have to take him seriously and literally.
What Republicans like Trump want, I think, is simply have the abstract idea of decertification as a talking point to rile up the base and to make money. They see it as a possible way to maybe give Trump the option of being Speaker of the House when Republicans inevitably flip that chamber in 2022.
And, yet, as January 6th shows, it’s possible that things will take on a momentum all their own and if Trump rants about “decertification” enough, the the base will demand something be done about it. Then elected officials in MAGA states across the country will feel so much pressure that “Decertification Conventions” will be held.
Before you know it, because of mission creep, we go nullification then secession.
Then you start talking about the provisional Trumplandia federal government and how many Republicans are willing to jump off a cliff to join this new Red State collection of states.
But I think that at the moment, that’s really pushing things. Trump is all talk and a scaredy cat to boot. He just doesn’t have the autocratic chops to do all these dystopian things I come up with. This is something he’s proven again and again.
As such, I think we’re going to kick the crisis of civil war down the road until the 2024 – 2025 timeframe.
