Trump Stays At 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
How the unthinkable could so easily happen
Even though some votes remain to be counted, by any rational dispassionate analysis Joe Biden has won the 2020 US presidential election and Donald Trump has decisively lost. So in theory Trump should have conceded and Biden’s transition team should already be receiving the usual assistance from the government.
This is not, however, what is actually happening.
What’s actually happening is the infantile orange serial bankrupt is telling everyone who’ll listen that he “really” won. He’s filing lawsuits everywhere he can in the hope that ultimately the Supreme Court will enable him to remain in place for another four years. He’s pretending that imaginary voter fraud occurred, reminiscent of the imaginary bone spurs that permitted him to dodge the draft as a young man. As a compulsive liar, Trump has never hesitated to lie blatantly even when truth would have served him better. He’s throwing the world’s most public tantrum and like many other spoiled and stupid children he has learned that tantrums often succeed.
After the initial shock, Republican politicians across the nation are rallying behind their delusional leader and supporting his baseless claims of fraud. States in which Republicans hold the Governor’s office are backing legal action to disallow thousands of Democratic votes. The Department of Justice, now Trump’s personal legal SWAT team, has thrown its weight behind highly partisan efforts to disallow Democratic votes. Even the supposedly non-partisan General Services Administration, which provides resources to facilitate the transition between one administration and the next and is now headed by a Trump loyalist, has refused to begin assisting the Biden team on the grounds that “no ascertainment” of the election winner has been made.
Aside from pure petulance and his habitual denial of reality, Trump’s hope seems to be that if he throws enough mud, sows enough confusion, riles his supporters into enough of a frenzy, and finds any possible legal pretext to enable the 6:3 ultra-right-wing Supreme Court to declare him the winner despite the obvious fact that he lost, he will get to stay in the White House.
In normal times this would be a vain hope.
But since 2016 we have not lived in normal times. Since 2016 mindless populism has swept the globe and the USA was one of the very first nations to fall. Despite Trump’s total incompetence, obvious mental inadequacy, and ceaseless petulant whining, an astonishing seventy-one and a half million citizens voted for him a few days ago. Seventy-one and a half million US voters are evidently so amazingly stupid, ignorant, and lacking in all judgement that they genuinely thought voting for a psychologically unstable baby-man was the right thing to do.
These people have thus demonstrated by their votes that they are so devoid of mental capacity they will believe anything they’re told. And they’re been told every minute of every day by irresponsible Republican politicians that Biden didn’t really win. These empty-heads will continue unhesitatingly to swallow the lies about voter fraud, and about how mail-in ballots are magically “illegal.” They require no proof, are incapable of reason, and thus are perfect dupes who keep coming back for more.
And these seventy-one and a half million Republican voters aren’t going anywhere. Furthermore, repellent creatures such as Mitch McConnell, Ron Johnson, Roy Blunt, Mike Pompeo, and far too many others of the same ilk are not hesitating to support Trump’s lies because they know if they want to stay in power they need to pander unceasingly to the basest instincts of these seventy-one and a half utterly mindless voters.
So let’s imagine following scenarios, individually or in any combination you care to imagine:
Thousands of heavily armed Trump supporters protest for days outside government buildings across the nation, threatening violence as the police stand carefully back. Trump calls out the National Guard to protect the USA against “Democratic terrorists” and invokes a clause that allows Federal employees to arrest, detain, and forcefully interrogate anyone they want — but to no one’s surprise, only those identifying as Democrats are snatched.
An avalanche of spurious lawsuits promoted assiduously by the Department of Justice and strongly supported by every Republican politician of note ensures that the transition period is consumed by meritless but effective stalling tactics. Meanwhile the DoJ simultaneously does everything possible to charge senior Biden personnel and Biden family members with all manner of imaginary crimes. Trump tours the red States and pouts approvingly as his indoctrinated supporters chant “lock them up!”
The GoP remains solidly behind Trump and repeats his lies on every TV station and radio station across the country, day in and day out, ensuring that civic unrest, political instability, and general chaos grow worse with each passing day. This will then be presented as “the American people know who really won” and Democrat politicians will ultimately decide to concede in order to “save the nation from ongoing chaos.”
Republican governors and other senior politicians exert enormous pressure on easily-swayed Electors who then, as is their legal right under the dysfunctional US Constitution, decide to cast their electoral votes not for Biden as the voters intended but instead for Trump. This will then be dressed up as thoroughly democratic and a vindication of Trump’s reality-denying lies.
The Supreme Court finds a pretext by means of which Trump can remain in the White House (perhaps the state of the nation will be judged to be “too precarious” for a heavily disputed transition to occur and so the six far-right Justices will look to some obscure law that can be very loosely interpreted to suggest a State Of Emergency exists and in such a state the sitting president must stay put).
The Republican-dominated Senate drafts bills to support Trump’s continued tenure, and a sufficient number of Democrats, now weakened in the House by Republican gains, meekly fall into line in order to “save” the nation from further unrest.
Of course, none of these things could possibly happen.
They are impossible — as impossible as an infantile incompetent being elected president and then spending four years defecating all over the US Constitution, destroying vital alliances while sycophantically crawling to lick the boots of tyrants, vomiting up endless lies every time he opens his mouth, and making the USA a global laughing-stock.
The fact is, the USA has zero defenses against tyranny. Even the brainless baby-man Trump, a byword for incapacity and incompetence, was able to walk across every supposed check and balance. It didn’t take a ruthless or cunning or highly intelligent person to show how hollow the US Constitution really is: all it took was a blustering brainless sack of orange pus.
So let’s be cautious when we tell ourselves comforting tales about how Trump will be escorted from the White House in January.
Every aspect of normality ceased to exist four years ago and there is little sign that anything has changed since November 3rd 2020. The fact is, the power of the US government is in Trump’s hands and he will not hesitate to use every weapon at his disposal. His only limiting factor is his unbreachable stupidity. But that may not be enough to ensure that Biden ultimately takes up residence in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue next year.
Because the last four years have demonstrated beyond any doubt that being stupid beyond belief is no impediment these days. Indeed, seventy-one and a half million US voters firmly believe it’s a prerequisite.
There is, therefore, far more than just a slender chance that Trump will still be in power by the end of January 2021.
The future may be very dark indeed.
