by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarer
The United States is a big, big country. It takes time for some big event to sink in with 330 million people. A lot of people are gaming. Or coding. Or binge watching The Office on Peacock.
So, there’s some lag time between, say, when something like a coup attempt that happened day happens and when it gets processed. As such, there’s something of a significant lag time for any major decision to be made. That’s why gun rights advocates hate, hate, hate any type of decision being agreed upon when people are focused and upset about 20 or 30 kids being shot to death. They know if they can just wait 24 to 48 hours that things will calm down, the dynamic will change and lulz, nothing maters.
I’ve been giving this dynamic a lot of thought as we process the coup attempt of 01/06. We have a number of paths ahead of us. One path is we never reach any type of crucial mass and the Trump era is completely value free other than a plutocrat tax cut and a massive amount of young, hack MAGA judges. It will be like it never happened.
We’ll be in political neutral for two years until Biden is impeached the moment Republicans regain the House. And if Trump can just behave for two weeks, that’s exactly what will happen. He just needs to chill out for two weeks and still — still — everything will be “forgiven” by the Right. He can come back tan, ready and rested in 2024 and go back to being a chaos agent for Russia. (Or Ivanka can primary Rubio and have Josh Hawley as her veep and the two of them can be a Velvet Fist in American politics for a generation to come.
But.
There is the problem of Trump going totally fucking bonkers at an alarming rate.
So two things would be at play. One, Trump’s obvious seditious and bonkers behavior would begin to sink in with a lot more people than it might otherwise because of the coup attempt….and a shit ton of people in the next 24 hours are going to see what happened while they were looking and porn and be completely flabbergasted.
As such, either the post-mass-killing dynamic will be at work or something really unique will happen: a counter coup.
In this scenario, the already severe (but manageable) political crisis we’re in is taken to the next level and even though Trump has only two fucking weeks left in office he is somehow removed.
It would be one of the most surreal events in American history.
I have repeatedly over the last few years suggested that something like this was possible. But Blue Check liberals think I’m just another Internet crank, so, lulz, nothing matters.
I would suggest we keep a close eye on Trump. He’s likely to grow ever more erratic on a minute-by-minute basis. He just can’t do the one thing he needs to do: behave.
And the reason is, he’s in a logic trap. He’s thinking not about any type of political future, but pure self-preservation. And there’s going to be significant lag time (a few days) between when Trump goes to a purely self-preservation stance and when the people in the Republican Party who are still thinking about political considerations get woke to this fact.
Trump has already “lost it” as one person close to him has told CNN, so that lag time is now in effect. The question is — the issue of how all of this bounces off American self-perception.
MAGA has about 38% of the electorate under its spell. But there are probably 10% (or more) of those people who are conservative-but-not-MAGA who support Trump because of negative polarization. They hate the center-Left more than they dislike Trump and, so, they support Trump.
The jury is still out about what happens next. Trump, as always, has his fate in his own hands. I think as of this moment he’s probably going to live to fight another political day. Whatever he did to finally — FINALLY — cause his enablers in Congress to cut him loose would have to be pretty fucking bad, given what happened to day.
And he could very well survive for no other reason than the clock runs out.
But.
It’s also possible that the clock WILL RUN OUT and he by that point he will be so completely fucking deranged that he won’t physically leave the White House. Then we have the “Downfall” scenario that I’ve mentioned a few times before and I don’t like thinking about.
