Part Twenty-One: 2021

Ah yes, America. The country where Republicans spend all day screaming that socialism is happening and Democrats spend all day making sure it never does. – Caitlin Johnstone

The eternal mystery of Trumpus. Of course, he’s a gross misogynist, a sadist and a racist who appears to hunger for opportunities to exert gratuitous cruelty. But for five years, liberal commentators have wavered between two major views of what he is at the core, each of which has been backed by mounds of evidence. Is he shamelessly ignorant, a steaming cesspool of idiocy and denial who believes the image that the media has created for him? Or is he a brilliant con man, plotting several moves ahead, the leader of an organized crime family who’s made an entire career of stealing from those who most adore him?

The final weeks and now days before the inauguration have him displaying both sides. Is he hiding out at Mar-A-Largo playing golf, emerging only to tweet nonsense or berate subordinates, or is he slyly continuing to exhort his base to protest the election, even as he pockets over $250 million from them?

For those of us who can avoid the temptation of easy demonization and take a step back into American myth, there’s a third possibility: yes / and. Behind our superficial religiosity, aren’t we all at the core both materialists hoping to “get ahead” and astonishingly stupid (see Parts 16 and 17)? No con man or any other kind of celebrity can exist for long in our culture without the collusion of the public. Trumpus is the essential American. He is us. We needed him to arise in these years. We dreamed him up and vomited him out onto our projective landscape of the imagination so as to bring out the darkest truths of our collective racial and military madness, our culture of uninitiated adults,

Republican Corruption: Over two million people have voted prior to the January fifth Georgia run-offs. A judge has ordered officials in two rural counties to stop invalidating voter registrations due to so-called “unreliable” change of address information, a ruling that could protect over 4,000 residents from voter suppression. Meanwhile, in Cobb County (whose half million voters had preferred Biden over Trumpus by 56% to 42%), officials cut the number of early voting stations from eleven during the general election down to five for the runoff. And over 120 counties simply and illegally closed polling stations on the weekends. 

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It’s hard to keep up with Trumpus’ level of sleaze, but Ted Cruz is trying. He is raising money for the runoff – but the actual beneficiary is his own campaign committee. And he’s not the only one, writes Lachlan Markay. The National Republican Senatorial Committee “encouraged its members to use grassroots donor enthusiasm surrounding the runoffs to help build their own fundraising programs.” Several politicians, including McConnell – and Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York – have lined up to feed at this particular trough.

How would you like your sleaze? The previously disgraced and recently pardoned General Michael Flynn (whom many believe is Q himself) is now hawking QAnon merchandise.

Meanwhile, speculation continues about what Trumpus and friends will do on January 6th, when Congress is supposed to count the electoral ballots and give final confirmation for Biden:

Here’s how the rest of Trump’s desperate effort to stay in power will play out

Conservative writer reveals 3 main fears insiders have about Trump’s last days in office

Trump Encourages ‘Wild’ Protests in D.C. on Date of Electoral College Vote Count

Pro-Trump Missouri senator announces he will contest Biden’s certification

Gohmert suit may force Pence’s hand in effort to overturn Trump’s defeat

Once that date passes, there will still be two weeks of crazy before the inauguration, during which Trumpus can still make his last stand. The U.S. military has sent missile-laden cruisers to the South China Sea and B-52 bombers over the Persian Gulf. Iran’s foreign Minister voiced what is obvious to anyone but believers in American innocence, that Trumpus is fabricating a pretext to attack Iran. Although last year’s widely feared October Surprise never happened, anything could still happen, because it has happened in the past.

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Got Democracy? Yes, there was a large increase in voters in November. About 67% of eligible voters cast ballots, but that still means a third – eighty million adults – did not. Finally, somebody (the Medill School of Journalism) has surveyed non-voters, and the results should not surprise critics of the Democratic National Committee.

Twenty percent disliked both candidates. A majority of those eighty million people believe it makes no difference who is elected president and that things will go on just as they did before. They are less likely to say that elections in this country are free and fair for all. They are also more likely to be younger and make less money than voters – and they are exactly the demographic the Dems might have been interested in. However, fewer than a quarter of them (compared to almost half of voters) said any political campaigns had reached out to them. They also, as I wrote throughout the campaign, tend to be Latino. Only 52% of Latinos surveyed said they were registered to vote, compared to 80% of whites and 78% of Blacks.

Although Latinos heavily favored Biden, the DNC’s still-incomprehensible unwillingness to reach out to them with appropriate vigor and raise their voting numbers certainly cost them the Senate. With real Latino turnout, the Georgia runoffs would be an afterthought.