by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
As I’ve repeatedly said — I got Trump wrong. But I was not alone. In fact, the people who voted for Trump in 2016 got him wrong too. And that’s the thing people like me going into the 2020 election totally misjudged — we thought Trump was an autocrat when he was just a fucking idiot.
The biggest mistake that Trump made was he did not strike when any other would be autocrat would have struck — in the summer of 2020. This is where Trump’s innate stupidity and laziness comes in. This is where him being nothing more than a vessel for white rage, rather than him being a Great Man comes in.
The moment that Trump let the election be called for Biden, was the moment he not only lost in the traditional political sense, but also when he started to panic. So, from that point in November to January 6th, Trump and his goons thrashed around, looking for some way to stage a self-coup, or autogolpe. The plan was something along the lines of, Trump would incite the insurrection and either that would be enough to browbeat Pence into not doing his job, or somehow something would go wrong in a big enough manner that Trump could literally stage the first autogolpe in American history. (In a very ham-handed manner.)
But everything — thankfully — went wrong for them on the day of. Pence, weirdly enough, did the right thing. And there were no counter-protesters to at the Capitol to give Trump a cause belli when it came to overthrowing the government via calling a “National Security Emergency.”
The key issue is what are we going to going forward?
When Trump’s autogolpe failed, the United States entered a very strange era where we’re an autocracy without an autocrat. We’re living in Weimar America. The failure of the January 6th autogolpe radicalized the Republican Party and set the stage for us to either slip peacefully into autocracy in four years or to have a civil war.
And, at the moment, it really could go either way. For the time being, I think we’re going to become an autocracy. But there is a small chance that things will get out of control and one side or the other will begin to leave the Union and we’re going to bomb ourselves into the Stone Age.
I wish there was something I could do on a personal basis to help prevent either one of those outcomes, but there isn’t. There’s no democracy defending organization to counter The Patriot Front. We need one, but it doesn’t exist. And, at the moment, our best bet is there’s something akin to a WW3 that so jiggles our domestic dynamic that Democrats can survive in power long enough for some severe structural problems in the United States to be fixed.
