by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
It’s not great how close someone like Mike Pompeo is to being president of the United States. Of all the would-be autocrats within the Republican Party at the moment — and there are at least a dozen –Pompeo is special (at least to me) because he’s so brazen about what a fucking tyrant he would be, given the opportunity. Case in point:
This is pretty basic autocratic stuff and if Pompeo became president he knows the levers of power well enough to make his tyrannical, illiberal vision of America a very painful reality. When he’s not union-busting, he’ll be leaning on major media companies by threatening their broadcast licenses or “disappearing” people like me using a weaponized ICE.
And our liberal order in America is so weak at the moment, it will probably happen in broad daylight and nothing will happen. There might be some outrage here or there but, in general, so many wealthy liberals will be on the way out of the country that no real resistance will happen in the real world where it would be needed.
But let me be clear — Mike Pompeo is just a unique strain of a whole autocratic pot dispensary of Republican would-be autocrats. By definition — the next Republican president will be a fascist autocrat and America’s slide into illiberal democracy is now an immutable force of political future history. We may punt it down the road some or change the context some, but this is it — we’re now in the final days of American democracy one way or another.
It just happens that something about former fat fuck Pompeo bothers me because he seems to really hate the press for some reason. Asshole.
But Pompeo would have to win election first, of course, and the way things are going, it definitely looks like the only way that will ever happen is if Trump picked him as his veep in 2024. Which is possible, but not probable.
Pompeo is sort of in a race against time — unless it’s old and fat Trump who becomes our autocrat in 2025, then it will be young and angry DeSantis who will politically cockblock his chances of being our first autocrat. So, I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see if Trump’s veep is someone like Pompeo or if it’s someone like MTG. Only time will tell.
