by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I called it. I said Trump would likely go bonkers around the time Congress counted Electors and I was right. And, in a more vague way, I predicted that we were careening towards something of a “political 9/11.”
And so here we are.
The conundrum of where we are now is we have only a fortnight left in the Trump Era. That’s it. Two weeks. If we can just make it through the next two weeks, then we lurch — maybe are pushed — into something quite unexpected: a true autocracy without an autocrat.
Our democracy is obviously so fragile that if Trump really was “the guy from The Apprentice” then, well, we wouldn’t be talking about Biden coming into office. Trump would have done the hard work of stealing his second term, he’d have a thin veneer of legality and that would be that.
And, yet, for all my endless speculation that Trump would do this or that autocratic thing, it turns out he really is just a deranged version of Chauncy Gardner from Being There.
TRUMP LITERALLY IS CHAUNCY GARDNER FROM BEING THERE.
What this means is, we were all so busy assuming he was an autocrat that we missed that while he may have autocratic impulses, Trump is such a ding-dong that he can’t — or won’t — do the hard work necessary to actually become an autocrat.
As such, all the conditions and tools for autocracy are just laying around in our politics and society, waiting to be picked up by Josh Hawley (or whomever.) So, we’re probably going to just drift into the Biden Era and be in neutral until Biden gets inevitably impeached.
But.
Trump is so fucking bonkers right now that he could self-own in such a spectatular fashion in the next two weeks that the political 9/11 that we had to day could actually be a series of pollical 9/11s that absolutely FORCE us to act to push Trump out of office for no other reason than we’ve come to think he’s a threat to himself — or us.
I have no idea what is going to happen.
But it’s going to be weird.
