All the actions that the Loser Donald Trump is taking to cling to the presidency will, in the end fail, and, in 70 days on January 20, Joseph R. Biden Jr. will be sworn in as the 46th President of the United States. Trump can cause a lot of damage in those 70 days and he has already started by placing his loyalists in power at the Pentagon and the intelligence services.
Mark Esper was just the start. Days after President Trump lost the 2020 election, and hours after the ouster of the defense secretary that had been long in his crosshairs, several other officials in top Pentagon and Intelligence Community roles have been canned. Their replacements all have a reputation for being Trump loyalists. Two of them worked for Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) before joining the administration and a third has also been linked to Nunes’ efforts to politicize intelligence to further Trump’s false claims about the “Deep State.”
Lawyers, Guns and Money‘s Paul Campos notes a Twitter thread by Jared Yates Sexton, a political commentator and associate professor from Indiana, that deserves to be read in full.
People keep asking whether Trump and the Republicans attempt to steal the election is legitimate, if it’s a coup, if it’s a fundraising scheme, if it’s posturing, if it’s actually all that dangerous.
The answer is yes. All of these things and so much more.
1/
— Jared Yates Sexton (@JYSexton) November 10, 2020
The first thing we have to establish is that Trump is erratic. He flails and rages. But that flailing and raging, paired with his shamelessness, exposes weaknesses in our system.
When Trump finds a weakness, he exploits it until he breaks through.
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— Jared Yates Sexton (@JYSexton) November 10, 2020
Right now Trump is defeated. He has no legitimate means of winning this election and so he’s throwing everything at it in hopes something will stick. At times, it’s laughable, but all he needs is ONE THING to work.
3/
— Jared Yates Sexton (@JYSexton) November 10, 2020
And yes, Trump is using this crisis as a means of fundraising. Sending out alarming emails and messages raises money from angry supporters desperate for hope, but it also continues to establish an escalating crisis.
It does multiple things at once.
4/
— Jared Yates Sexton (@JYSexton) November 10, 2020
Trump is a gambler playing multiple hands. He’s a terrible gambler, but his entire life he’s just trying so many angles at so many times that he waits until he finds something that even halfway works.
This? Right now? This is multiple hands of badly played poker.
5/
— Jared Yates Sexton (@JYSexton) November 10, 2020
So what are the possible outcomes?
Trump loses but saves face.
Trump loses but raises money.
Trump manages to break through, subvert democracy, and steals the election.
These are all “wins” for him even if it means radicalizing people and a coup.
6/
— Jared Yates Sexton (@JYSexton) November 10, 2020
For Campos, the most disturbing point is “that establishment Republicans probably don’t think the coup will work, but they are 100% OK with it if it does.” He goes further
Sexton’s conclusion that this is because they’re only about power in the end — a sort of O’Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four argument — is incomplete I think. They’re about power of course, but they also are about herrenvolk democracy, and they sincerely, to the extent that word can be applied to people like this, believe that Democrats have no legitimate claim to govern, because the Democrats win elections by getting the wrong people to vote for them, as opposed to the real Americans.
Of course they don’t say this, even to themselves (usually), but that’s the one true faith lurking at the bottom of the moral cesspools that pass for their souls.
We’re in trouble.
I can’t say I disagree.