The Election and After
Whether trump wins or not, we'll know in a few days, max. But his troupe of majordomos are already planning the succession, that is quite obvious. So I suspect they might know more than we do.
The election is going on right now, and watching from Europe is a little bit frustrating since the first results will come in some time around 3:00 in the morning. But here is my gut feeling: Trump could lose, and the people around him, especially his craziest surrogates are sensing this. And they're getting ready to take the mantle of the Great Scam.
You see, what very few people in the media have dared say, is that Trump has been scamming the evangelicals and the rest of his base, that strange hodgepodge of conspiracy theorists, cosplaying revolutionaries, survivalists, Kukluxers, those convinced fluorine in the water is turning the frogs gay, those who prefer to ingest horse de-wormer and industrial cleaner (MMS) rather than follow any suggestion made by “The Elites…”, those who fall for get-rich-quick schemes and then blame Wall Street for their failings (see GameStop or Bed Bath and Beyond meme stocks), various crypto-schemes … You know what I'm talking about.
For Trump and many of his supporters, these people have been a fantastic source of revenue and power. They are a captive audience and a captive group of consumers of nonsense. Anyone who can tap into them knows how valuable they are as a source of cash. When conservative Erick Erickson turned against Trump at one point, he lost around 30,000 followers and was soon back on the Trump train ... When Fox News announced that Arizona had gone for Biden, the pitchforks came out, and they bowed and scraped, and earned themselves a defamation suit…
To get racketeering rights to the Trump Scam, however, you have to prove yourself even more nutty, vulgar, loud, violent, and Westboro-level religious than Trump… You have to dance for him, dump all self-respect and moral backbone. This will explain why Tucker Carlson has suddenly started talking about being attacked by demons at night, and a fellow like JD Vance has been pushing all kinds of weird theories about women. Bannon, another Maga Leader in Waiting, prefers sounding like he knows what he’s talking about. He’s the “reasonable” maga. Stephen Miller likes the Dracula impression: unvarnished racism is his game. And so on…
They've learned from their master: always keep that base happy with anti-science, anti-expert, pseudo-religious nonsense, and myriad conspiracy theories. You have to keep the spectacle going without intermission. This has been Trump's main goal the whole time, and as long as he has some sort of power, at worst from the Oval Office, he can not only keep the money flowing from that base, but he can also sell out the entire United States. If he wins, he will do it with the blessing of a totally corrupt Supreme Court of the United states, and the backing of the former Republican Party, that is still trying to hang on to that base.
I don't know what a Kamala Harris presidency would look like. But if you read Barack Obama’s A Promised Land, he says it quite clearly and in his fine style: the White House changes you. Many accused him of betraying his own base, which was out for the blood of the banks after the collapse of Lehman Bros., and maybe rightly so. But once in office, in January 2009, he felt the impact of being responsible for the entire nation (epistemic responsibility), and also for the well-being of the world economy, and for that he had to make some serious compromises. That's democracy. It's not a perfect system, but at least we have some semblance of choice and the right to push back.
The one thing the Oval Office did not do to Trump: Change him. He remained the same cheap scammer he always was.