Trump’s reelection is in trouble. To be sure it is far from assured that Biden will win this contest. If fact, while it can’t be quantified, I think a major factor in Hillary Clinton’s Electoral College loss in 2016 was that so many people assumed that the election was predetermined, certain that Trump simply couldn’t win that, that those who stayed home and did not vote subtracted just enough votes from her to give the Presidency to Trump. That’s a factor I do not think will be repeating.

During the Obama Presidency conservative commentators and friends seemed to harp on an endless list of ‘scandals’ and ‘abuses’ committed by the president and his administration. (I placed them in quotes because it is my opinion many of them were simply ginned up for political purposes but I have no intention of litigating them here.)

Many of those same commenters and friends have been silent on such abuses, fraud, and corruption during the Trump presidency.

Should Biden win the White House I expect that many of those voice will suddenly find corruption and abuses to horrify them. To which I say to them:

“I do not care at all for your opinion on this. It is valueless.”

They will cloak their opinions in phrases such as ‘rule of law’ and ‘abuse of power,’ but their silence during Trump’s years make plain that their interest is not in principal but politics. They have devotion to morality, fairness, or justice but only to whatever club is convenient for them to wield against their political enemies.

The title of today’s post in not to disparage the importance of any of the subjects but just because I’m doing quick comments and opinions and several at once rather than diving deep into any of them.

Juneteenth

Under unexpectedly harsh criticism the Trump campaign has moved the date of the return to rally event off June the 19^th. Trump himself has said it was moved ‘out of respect,’ but that’s a statement I consider to be yet another lie. Aside from possibly Jared and Ivanka it is my opinion that Trump has never manifested any respect for anyone other than himself. More likely, and this is sheer speculation, Ivanka persuaded him to move the event as though a single bucked of water pumped from this political Titanic could make any difference.

LGBQT Rights

This morning the US Supreme Court ruled, 6-3, that the 1964 civil right law that forbade discrimination in employment on account of sex protected sexual orientation as well. Well, that’s an unexpected gift for Pride month.

Trump vs. The Ramp

At the commencement ceremony for the graduating class of West Point, the site of the United States most infamous treason, Trump had clearly visible difficulty navigating the shallow ramp prompting more speculation about his physical health. While a president’s physical health is of vital national importance, such as concealing when the President has suffered a stroke while in office, this matter is rather more of a distraction. Trump’s ignorance, pettiness, bigotry, corruption, and tendency to view himself and his office in authoritarian terms are reasons enough to remove him from office.

Defund the Police

Policing in the United States is terrible. It is applied unjustly, frequently with racial bias, and police forces throughout the nation too often have the culture of an occupation force rather than public servants. Much has been made about the police’s non-use of a heavy-handed tactics during protests over pandemic driven lockdowns versus the deployment of batons, riot gear, and tear gas against peaceful protester participating in the Black Lives Matter movement. I do not think it is mere coincidence that police forces have reacted with unjustified force against people directly challenging their authority. We must reinvent policing in the nation.

As protests, unrest, and repression continues throughout this country over the killing of George Floyd the unifying chant heard from protesters is ‘Black Live Matter.’ The Chat did not start with this protest but is sadly years old and is likely to be carried forward for years to come.

A common response from those in disagreement is ‘All Lives Matter,’ and less common but more contentious is the response ‘Blue Lives Matter.’ Both of these responses miss the point and the reason for why the BLM movement exists at all.

The terrible truth of the matter is that black lives are valued less by our society and our culture than other lives. In terms of income, wealth, education, justice, health, voting, and in life expectancy, it is painfully clear that societally black lives simply do not count as much, commanding far less attention for injustices of all kinds visited upon and receiving far less resources to address their troubles. To say ‘Black Lives Matters’ is to say that these devalued should be valued. It is not taking lives that are equally valued and placing them above the rest, which is the implication of the response ‘All Lives Matter,’ it is trying to remove the blinders that keeps many people from seeing the terrible price black lives pay for merely existing in our society.

“Blue Lives Matter’ is beyond wrong it is egregious and a perversion of the argument. First off there are no ‘blue lives,’ policeperson is a chosen identity not one assigned by accident of birth or societal bigotry. Every cop out there chooses to be a cop a choice that is incomparable to race. Secondly, ‘blue lives’ are more valued in our society that other lives. Crimes against the police are punished more heavily than comparable crimes against average citizens. (NOT civilians, the police are civilians and the use of that term to describe non-police is part of the police’s culture of occupation that is exacerbating all of our problems.) In terms of valorization and resources police are valued far above nearly every other for of public employee and citizen.

It is a terrible thing that we must say ‘Black Lives Matter’ because is it an indictment of how far short we have fallen of our lofty cultural goals.

In his mind Trump never loses. Any loss is always either a secret win that he spins with enormous lies or a result of ‘cheating’ and betrayals. Everyone, including Trump himself, was ready for his endless and utterly false claims of having won the 2016 when it was expected that he could not win. But he did win. A think margin of 70,000 votes in less than a handful of states put him into the presidency and created the conditions of our current chaos.

At moment Trump is running for re-election and in national polls and in the battleground states he is losing to Biden. Moreover, he has never held a lead over Biden during this entire race and with the triple threat of a global pandemic, an economic crisis, and civil unrest the prospect for Trump to take the lead is rather slim. Not impossible mind you but the electoral map does not look good for team Trump.

Given that the map is threatening and Trump’s ego requires that he does not lose I wonder if there is a possibility that he’s going to turn the campaign ship and run it aground.

Not as a ‘quitter’ because that too runs afoul of his over-inflated ego, but could some action, particularly an action taken by the Republican party or elites, such as not having a crowd packed convention, provide him with an excuse that the ‘deep state’ and ‘corrupt elites’ have stabbed him and ‘the country’ in the back and he then drops out of the race?

It was on March 31 when LBJ stood down from his second full term and left the Democratic party in a shambles and Trump has less concern for his party than any party leader in history. He wouldn’t care that a summer declination to run would trash the GOP, all that matters to him is his ego. Before the August Convention the GOP will not have officially nominated anyone as their candidate, leaving open the possibility that it could be someone else.

I am not saying that this is a likely scenario but as we have seen so far in 2020 unlikely is far from impossible.

A friend on Facebook asked how was that conservatives were disgusted and ashamed by this presidency and its horrific actions.

The truth of the matter is that is a very human things to do to turn a blind eye towards one’s tribe and one’s self when looking for flaws and hypocrisy and simultaneously be hyper-aware of the same things in others. Understanding this requires understanding that people rarely go from one extreme to another in a single leap but rather get there by a thousand little steps, justifying, if they think about it at all, as unpleasant actions and compromises taken for a greater good. Think back upon Saruman in The Fellowship of the Ring, “Our goals need not change only our methods.”

That element of goals is critically important, it is what allows someone to accept the unacceptable because the destination is worth it. Of course, this is the classic ‘the ends justify the means,’ and that so often leads to terrible consequences but it is difficult to see that slow corruption in one’s self and it is equally difficult to admit error particularly for anything of high personal importance. So, when someone of your team acts in a dishonorable manner, cheats, or is abusive it is far easier to excuse it, justify it, or point an accusing finger back at the opponents than face the painful truth of what you have even tacitly supported.

However, this has limits and eventually people either abandon their previously held truths for new ones or they abandon the tribes associated with their previous selves and both are ruptures of identity.

Among conservatives you can watch this process in action. Some have gone silent, simply no longer associating with the tribe as it currently stands, some have abandoned the tribe and formed their own new identity, the ‘never Trumpers,’ and some have adopted the uniform of their new movement, washing away their former ideals. It is wrong to think of conservatives as a single monolithic block and the same is true for any very large ideology. The reactions among conservatives is varied but the political party and its apparatus is firmly in the control of a single faction, Trump’s, and it would be best not to confuse the larger collection with the party.

Over at The Bulwark, a place for ‘Never Trumpers’ conservative to make their case from the right that Trump is a deranged, unstable, and terrible person to hold the office of the Presidency Charlie Sykes made this observation:

But in this case, the vector of this disease is not Twitter: the root of the malignancy is the president himself. Until we deal with Trump, everything else is just noise, because he is the bully pulpit.

I sympathize with Charlie. A political organization that he had believed in, devoted his adult life to, and fought for is now lead by a narcissistic man-baby throwing tantrums and feces at anything and anyone that displeases him, but Trump is not the root, he is not the cause, he is the end result of decades of ‘red meat’ cultivation by GOP heads that believed that they could always control the monster that they created, the GOP rabid base.

Trump did not, like Athena from Zeus’ forehead, spring fully formed during the Republican Primary but rather he grew in carefully cultivated ground. He grew in soil prepared with decades of racist attacks carefully coded to allow plausible deniability, in soil watered with attacks on expertise, in soil weeded of dissent and inconvenient facts, and in soil that was sheltered with illusionary morality providing its fruit of illegitimate righteousness.

The leaders of the GOP injected their base with steroids of hate, deploying state initiatives banning gay marriage, demonizing undocumented immigrant without ever truly addressing the big businesses that employ them, stood aside while the levers of power were deployed in endless investigations of political enemies, turned blind eyes to overtly racist and baseless attack on politicians of color all while cloaking their supporters with an armor of victimhood, asserting that they were the ‘true victims’ of untampered hate.

No, Trump is not the root cause he is the inevitable metastasized tumor of this untreated cancer.

It is a presidential election year, the economy is in shambles, a pandemic ravages the US population, and the political partisanship is a mental pandemic that has infected out psyche for years.

Trump won the presidency with an electoral college victory from votes that total less than the number of Americans that have died from COVID-19 against an opponent that rightly or wrong carried 30 years of personal and political baggage into the contest with an electorate that had the erroneous sense that Trump simply couldn’t emerge victorious.

This time his opponent doesn’t spark the same visceral emotions, unemployment is skyrocketing, everyone knows he can win, and there is a clear record that Trump is incapable of making a pivot to being ‘presidential.’ There is every possibility that Trump will lose.

Setting aside the more fantastical result of a Trump defeat that he simply refuses to leave office and assuming the much more probable outcome that Biden is sworn in next year what happens next?

First off, Trump will insist and never move from the position that the election was ‘stolen.’ Illusionary and delusional claims of ‘voter fraud’ will be his constant whine. Because the GOP voting base is solidly behind him, they will pick up and echo these baseless conspiracies.

Because there is money to made in sky high rating, Fox News will make him a frequent feature in the broadcasts, keeping the base energized and watching.

In order to retain the support of the GOP voters that determine life and death in the primaries Republican Politicians will hew to, endorse, and legitimize all of his insane, nonsensical, and baseless charges of fraud, driving the party further into his ‘ideology.’ White nationalist will continue to gain power in the GOP and the ‘Never Trumpers’ will be as outcast of the Birchers once were.

This is the future of the National Republican Party for at least the next decade.