Fine, let’s talk Trump and MAGA.
When I talk about things getting easier after 2024 – note that’s after, not during – I mean in terms of their absolute effective political power going into hopefully terminal decline. I don’t mean “things still can’t get violent,” because they can, and already have, and are continuing to be. It’s not at all unreasonable to suspect that they’ll in fact lean more heavily, not less so, on violence once they realise the political route is closed off to them.
The good news buried in that is that, again, most of them are past the age where they’re likely to actually engage in actual violence. But that’s by no means true of all of them, and some are entirely within the “kill the [commies|fags|dykes|(racial slurs here)] range.
But let’s keep it to 2024, for now, and lead with the latest historian begging Americans not to downplay Trump’s threats to use the military against them. Rolling Stone have a writeup on other plans to flood the country with troops. We have a report on how he wants some of his old aides from his first term to be executed, and of course we know they consider those convicted in the previous attempt to be political prisoners and “hostages.” Former members of his administration say that Trump’s stated plans to go after non-complaint media for revenge are absolutely serious – and these are people looking forward to being part of it, being “yes, and we can’t wait.”
Mike Godwin, the creator of “Godwin’s Law” on Usenet, says: Yes, it’s okay to compare Trump to Hitler. Don’t let me stop you. I mean, when someone says they will be a dictator, believe them.
There would also be the inevitable mass of corruption in a second Trump term. Authoritarian governments are almost always filled to the brim with it, and a Trump back in power will be less “exception” and more “exemplar” of personal enrichment at the expense of citizen, taxpayer, and country. It’ll make Clarance Thomas’s bribery and graft issues – and Trump’s own first term corruption – a low-noise baseline by comparison.
None of that even begins to get into what he’d do for his best friend Putin. Withdraw the US from NATO? It was reportedly planned for his second term. Cease all military aid to Ukraine in an attempt to hand it over to Russia? Russian propagandists openly say so, and hope he gets back into office. They also expect the Republican Party as a whole to make sure Ukraine falls into Russian hands. And from intelligence reports, Putin himself believes that Ukraine would fall within months without continued American aid.
But before any of that can happen, they have to get back into power, so let’s talk the 2024 election and Republicans against the Republic. I think they expect to lose, and are planning accordingly.
Republican Rep. Thomas Massie tells states moving to disqualify Trump via the 14th Amendment that a Republican-controlled House may nullify millions of votes to get back at them. As in, they’ll fail to ratify the electors. That’s the same plan as last time – refuse to accept the result, throw the election into the House which they control, and then, put Trump back in power.
That’s only one axis. There’s also their Always Time Food, voter suppression, which they’re still ramping up as hard as they can and in ways that matter. The latest amazingly bald-faced example? Republicans are threatening to sue the the Nevada Secretary of State, Carson City and other counties for registering voters effectively.
But the main course today is Rolling Stone’s under-read and under-appreciated article, Inside Trump’s Plot to Corrupt the 2024 Election With ‘Garbage’ Data. It’s about the deeper meaning of Trump and MAGA’s attacks on ERIC, the system previously used to help states coordinate voter registration. Spoiler: it’s all part of setting up to contest the 2024 election the same way they contested 2020.
The intent in destroying ERIC is to create more room for doubt about his inevitable claims of election fraud in 2024 by causing voter registration data in Republican states to be less accurate, and thereby create “plausible deniability” (to use an old term), making claims of fraud sound … if not more reasonable, certainly more possible. It’s to give his supporters more room to believe his lies.
The story also covers new efforts at pre-election voter suppression (such as the above), and Republican efforts to recruit thousands of people to serve as “poll watchers” and “election integrity directors” to create as much confusion as possible while intimidating Democratic voters.
As in 2020, all their plans are very much public. They are following Steve Bannon’s law of “flood the zone with shit” and putting everything and everyone they can in place in order to seize power anyway if – or I think when – they lose in 2024.
If you’re wondering: Mike Johnson is such a person. Trump thinks he’s “good” on elections, which is to say, will break every rule and law to make sure the results come out Trump’s way. That’s in the Rolling Stone article. And I agree.
As a cherry on top, here’s a small and mostly symbolic item, a story that came out as I was writing this update:
Donald Trump didn’t sign loyalty oath for Illinois ballot that pledges not to ‘advocate the overthrow of the government’.
It’s optional, of course. He didn’t have to sign it; it’s not actually required. But it’s part of the process, and he signed it in 2016 and 2020, and he refuses to sign it now.
What’s that say to you?
As Beau of the Fifth Column says, “Republicans want to rule you, not represent you.” That has a better hook than, “the authoritarian rot goes all the way down in the Republican Party” – but both are equally correct.
In recent news about the previous coup attempt:
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