Tag: Vichy France

Life During Trumplandia


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

One way to face your fears is to think about them so thoroughly that you turn an abstract fear in to a more understandable concrete one. So, let’s think through what like in “Trumplandia” will be like once the Russians steal the 2020 Election for Trump because we pulled out 1/3 of our troops from Germany at their behest.

Well, some of this is easy and some of it is hard.

It’s easy to see that once Trump is AGAIN politically pardoned for everything he’s done while in office that he’ll take his consolidation of power to the next level — he’s going to purge the press.

This could happen any number of different ways. But I’m going to assume it happens two different ways — “German Industrialists” do House Trump’s bidden by, say, buying up companies like Twitter while House Trump itself will lean on media companies to change their tune about House Trump….or else.

The broadcast companies — because of their government licences — are easy. The New York Times might be a bit more difficult to bring to heel, but when you have the entire power and weight of the US Government at your disposal it’s easy to imagine Rupert Murdoch finally owning the paper at last.

So, on a practical level, the first thing the average person will notice is a lot of fresh faces on TV and some pretty strange changes in tone at The New York Times and The Washington Post. I don’t think a lot of people appreciate how central the NYT is to the media ecosystem, so once it’s neutered, that will change a lot.

All the major late night talk show hosts will vanish off TV and a wave of new people will pop up who strangely avoid talking about politics altogether. In a sop to liberals, they may be women and minorities, but they will completely stop talking about politics because “it’s not popular.” It’s even possible that something weird will happen with SNL as well.

But all of this will happen in one fell swoop, so fast that there won’t be anyone to, well, report about it.

Once House Trump gets the free press out of the way, then Trump starts to rant about the need for a Constitutional Convention to “pass a balanced budget amendment.” This is where some sort of doublespeak “Second Bill of Rights” will be pushed through the MAGA dominated convention and, lulz, the United States will be officially transformed into Trumplandia.

The question, of course, is how will this affect the average person?

This is a very interesting question because on one hand, given how fragile and rotting out liberal democracy obviously is, it’s easy to imagine that this transformation will happen quite smoothly. And, yet, Trump himself is such a massive moron self-own artist, that things may get all fucked up. Instead of pulling a fast one on everyone, Trump could be so ham-handed in his smash-and-grab on the United States that people get really mad.

If that’s the case, then we’ll just continue to drift into an autocratic managed democracy in fits and starts. It will be Trump’s successor — Cotton? Pompeo? Don Jr.? — who will be able to do all the ratfucking that Trump obviously is desperate to do.

But one thing I think we really need to keep an eye on in Trump’s stolen second term is how much money Trump Org is able to suck out of our economy. Our economy is significantly bigger than Russia’s so it make sense that the House Trump could become the wealthiest “royal” family in the world pretty quick. All that ill-gotten cash can be turned around to bribe anyone who might get in their way going forward.

In the long run, it’s probably First Amendment rights that Americans will notice the erosion of the most. But by the time the “final pivot” happens with MAGA-Qanon it’s going to be way, way, way too late to worry about shit like that.

People like me are going to be told to “shut up if you know what’s good for you.” That will be the final answer from any MAGA-Qanon who happen to get into a debate with people like me.

The sad thing is, they’ll finally be right.

We Must Refuse to Normalize Trumplandia

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I’m of the opinion that Trumplandia is an anomaly in America’s history, much like Vichy France was anomaly in that otherwise proud nation’s history. Americans are too easy to poke fun of the French for Vichy France, when France pretty much ruled much of Europe for 20 years just a hundred years before.

So let’s talk Trumplandia.

First, I keep talking about it, but what is Trumplandia? I first heard the term during the 2016 election cycle when someone said the FBI was “Trumplandia.” I found the term intriguing and as events progressed I gradually came to see Trumplandia as America’s version of Vichy France. Trumplandia is that collection of individuals who support Trump for various reasons and are so blinded by their devotion to him on a personal level that they’ve lost sight of the obvious: this is not normal.

It’s not normal and the sooner those of us who oppose Trumplandia stop being outraged and start being engaged, the better. That’s the crux of the problem of The Resistance, I think. It is way, way too easy to stay angry all the time to such an extent that you get burnt out.

But instead of getting burnt out, I would suggest we, the opposition, get engaged. We have to stay focused. We have to keep our eyes on the prize — at the very least flipping Congress in 2018. The Vichy Republicans who cower in front of Trump are at the center of the bizarre situation we find ourselves in during the Trumplandia Era.

To me, the most startling aspect of Trumplandia, the part of it that could potentially make someone white hot with rage, is that seemingly otherwise normal individuals willfully voted for a bigot, a racist and a misogynist. That such a thing happened at all in this nation that I love continues to blow my mind.

What’s worse, there continues to be an active effort to normalize Trumplandia. There is definitely a disconnect between what a large segment of the population thinks about Trumplandia and what the mainstream media thinks. You see that disconnect in various places like Twitter and the late night comedy shows. It is there that right minded people are openly debating if the President of the United States is a traitor, a quisling.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media is only slowly beginning to realize the gravity of all of this. After facilitating Donald Trump’s rise to power, media outlets like MSNBC’s Morning Joe are just now, reluctantly beginning to see the error of their ways. That doesn’t even begin to address outlets like Axios which are built from the ground up to be complicit in normalizing Trumplandia.

That’s why all of this is so troubling.

We are living in a dystopian present and there doesn’t seem to be anyway out. There doesn’t seem to be any easy answers for the foreseeable future for no other reason than the Vichy Republicans are so complicit in Trumplandia that they wouldn’t do anything to Trump politically, even if it was proven that his 2016 campaign actively colluded with the Russian efforts to hack our election.

So, as I keep saying, we need to put our outrage to work. We need to stop being outraged and we need to start being engaged. That is the path out of this dystopia. That is the path out of surreal political environment that we find ourselves in.

Only by using our outrage in a constructive, meaningful manner can we smite Trumplandia from our political landscape once and for all. The weird thing about Trumplandia is it has completely upended the traditional Left-Right spectrum, at least on social media.

But history does not go in a straight line. There will be setbacks. Maybe even a lot of them. But if we stay engaged, stay focused it is inevitable that at some point we will be victorious.

Shelton Bumgarner is the editor and publisher of The TrumplandiaReport. He may be reached at migukin (at) gmail.com.