by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Something smells in the state of Arizona. It definitely seems as though Cyber Ninjas is doing everything in its power to get to the result it wants with its “audit:” Trump really won the state.
Now, there’s a lot to unpack with this.
One one hand, the whole endeavor is obviously bullshit. It’s meaningless “gesture politics” meant to give the faithful a talking point on Twitter. That’s it. And, yet, there is a risk that one of two things will happen — either Trump demands other states that he lost fair and square do the same thing or he really goes nuts and doesn’t even wait for that to happen. Trump seizes upon his dubious Arizona “win” and demands he be “reinstated” ASAP.
Then we have the same dynamic as January 6th, but on a national scale. If the first option happens, then just around election day 2022, half of the country will think there is “proof” that Trump is really POTUS. He becomes Speaker when the House flips and Speaker Trump has one goal — impeaching of Biden and Harris. He goes transactional, there’s massive political violence in 2023 and, Democrats in the Senate buckle because they don’t want a civil war. Trump is back in office in 2023 and we become an autocracy.
The other option goes like this — Trump gets his “win” in Arizona and freaks the fuck out just because of that one state. He demands that MAGA state legislatures “nullify” the Biden Administration. This quickly turns into a secession crisis and we have a civil war at some point between about now and, say, January 2022.
And, yet, both of those options, on the face of it, sound rather fantastical even to me. There is a lot I just can’t game out. I have no idea if anyone would actually listen to Trump if he went transactional about being “reinstated.” At the moment, Trump definitely seems politically dead in the water outside of the entire Republican bullshit echo chamber. But given the fact that the Republican Party is now a violent personality cult and, well, lulz. Who knows.
I don’t have any answers on this front. Just unease.
