By Kirsten Tona
What’s happening in America has already happened and there’s no going back.
Donald Trump is one fucked-up individual. And he’s a problem. But he is not the problem.
He’s a symptom.
What’s the US going to do when they wake up after the election to find they’re still about to crash into the moon, even if that particular piece of trash is in jail?
All those good souls whose eyes have been opened and are still hoping you can close them again if you get rid of this particular Buffoon-In-Chief: you can’t finesse your way out of it this time by signing pro-choice petitions and saying you marched with Dr King. There are too many elements at play and too many lost souls in charge.
You should have listened when revolutionaries warned you against liberals, but you wanted a quiet life and it was too easy to not live in the dark ghettos.
It’s hard to see how Trump can win on the day. Even 21st century democratic republican elections require some degree of input from the voting public, and who will vote for him? His base, of course, but they’re insane, they’d vote for the Cookie Monster if he offered them cookies. Literally. I mean they literally would. They already have. They did with him. And they’re still saying the cookies are tasty even though they’re yet to bite a single one. They’re insane.
The working class vote he captured last time with his “I’m not a politician” spiel have been disillusioned, they know if they have jobs or not and they don’t.
The silence from the nasty evangelists with their nasty Shining City on the Hill agenda has been deafening; maybe they’re all too busy deleting videos they took of them themselves, Mrs Nasty Evangelist, and the 3 Mexican pool boys?
Mind you, the Democratic Party are so far up their own arseholes they are entirely capable of losing; they listen to each other on MSNBC and genuinely seem to believe it matters what is said, but they have no strategists capable of telling them what they need to hear about where the “flyover states”* get their news and information from.
*(What a disgusting term. No wonder the “coastal elites” are hated, they really are vile, arrogant little pos. Second up against the wall.)
Nobody who isn’t being paid comes to the Trump rallies anymore (because COVID-19? Really? The Trump base believe in COVID-19? Do me a favour…) except the absolute die-hard base and there’s not enough of them.
But the ones who jumped off the Trump bandwagon when they realised the ride was too expensive and it was heading for the cliff really, really don’t want to vote Dem. And I don’t blame them.
Some disillusioned ex-Trumpers will vote Dem anyway, they’ll hold their noses and do it. Some of them will hold their noses and vote Trump even though they know what he is now, because change is change and change is needed. It largely depends on what they believe about Portland and Kenosha, which largely depends on where they, their friends, their family and their church folk get their news.
How much longer he can keep the Megachurches, is an issue. They got their payoff for bringing him the numbers last time — the payoff being Mike Pence — but what good did it do them? Tax breaks can’t help you if you don’t pay taxes in the first place, they haven’t had any really major wins in the Supreme Court, a lot of them may be of the opinion that Ted Cruz would have been far better at pretending he’d read the Bible — Cruz probably has read it, the VeggiTales version of it.
And even the religious extremists must be thinking: if Trump-Pence win again Mike Pence may have to move his neck and I don’t know if the Earth’s gravitational field could cope.
For them it’s all about the Supreme Court. If Trump is the Promised One he has to deliver on that, and frankly, he hasn’t. Last month’s decision that Civil RIghts Act covered LQBTQI was a loss for conservatives, and the majority opinion was written by Neil Gorsuch—Trump’s first Supreme Court appointee! The evangelists want their rigid worldview supported by the people they backed into power if they’re expected to support them again. Last week’s decision supporting employers’ rights to religious exemptions from paying for contraception in health care plans was the result they wanted, but don’t even mention June Medical Services v. Russo to them, their narrow little hearts can’t take it. It means no movement on Roe v Wade, the white whale of the anti-choicers… And Ruth Bader Ginsberg keeps refusing to die. Trump has not really delivered.
Big Oil are haemorrhaging money. There’s a hole in their back pocket through which they’re losing a lot of the spare Senators they usually keep there, and Russia with its well-oiled Kompromat machine has been hoovering them up instead. So Big Dirty Energy is not going to be able to sway as much influence as it’s used to. Rats deserting sinking ships over in that quarter, the writings on the wall for US gas and oil companies. Look for a coming influx of female CEOs… it’s called the Glass Cliff.
The cat-and-mouse game between Russian and Chinese social media engineering and those Americans still left in the FBI who are smart and motivated enough to stop them (about 3) will be interesting to watch.
Zuckerberg almost broke a sweat last time he was congressional-hearing-questioned by AOC, and that’s pretty amazing for an actual android.
But however well foreign influencers can use Zuke’s Kompromat, kidnap people’s Chinese relatives, and cook vote-counting machines, they can only move a certain number of percentage points. It may not be enough to counter the anti-Trump feel. Which is pretty fervent. For good reason. The man’s a Russian asset for a start. You’d think that alone would be a fair reason to disqualify him.
I’m not suggesting evangelicals and conservatives will vote for Biden, who despite his Catholicism has firmed as pro-choice. Just that more of them may stay at home. Anti-Trumpers won’t stay at home, believe it.
There will be other factors, of course, but none of them on their own will be enough to control this particular election: the element of surprise has been lost. Now all the players are bunkered down spying on each other and launching counter-offensives to prevent the other side’s counter-offensives from being launched… it’s like a really boring game of chess where people don’t care about winning so much as they just really, really, really don’t want you to win. It makes one nostalgic for the Cold War.
From here, I can’t see the Trump ship people controlling enough of the game for a win, but strange things happen at the one-two point, as they say in the game Go. Nobody really believes Trump will lose, it just hasn’t been that kind of a year, decade, century. And nobody thinks he will go even if the poll numbers are clear. He knows he’s going to jail as soon as he does. He’ll play war games from the underground bunker before he’ll do that willingly.
But Trump doesn’t matter. What’s happening in America was built into its foundation. Genocide and the rape of an entire continent will never and should never end well for the rapist. The Declaration of Independence was a lot of pretty words, from wealthy white men. Hint: fellas, if you want a Constitution and a Declaration of Rights that will last, hand it over to old black women: they’ve got nothing to lose and they care more about their grandchildren’s futures. And they won’t be writing pretty words in pretty libraries while females and slaves cook, clean, and take out the trash. So they’ll remember to include who does those things as a core component. Because that’s what a society boils down to, in the end: who does the work no one wants?
* * * * *
What’s happening in America has already happened.
It happened when Isabella of Castile and her imbecile husband funded Columbus; it happened when that authoritarian compact was signed on the Mayflower, strangling the hope of an inclusive democracy before its birth; it happened when the Puritans massacred the Wampanoag and barbarously called their victory feast “Thanksgiving”; and it happened when Thomas Jefferson took Sally Hemings to France to wash his socks and warm up his bed while he sat in coffee bars planning the writing of the words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”
It happened when slave-owners, hypocrites and control freaks ignored their own Bible and tried to build a lasting edifice on genocide and sand.
And it’ll keep happening until the world ends or power-hungry white men get the fuck out of the way, whichever comes first, and this year the smart money is on the former.
* * * * *
I admit I’ll enjoy my schadenfreude moments as much as the next sad, tired, person. I’ll enjoy seeing the Bad Orange Man in a good orange jumpsuit. I’ll especially enjoy seeing Incest Porn Barbie and the Overbite Twins go to jail, they are just horrible. Maybe they’ll finally let Tiffany talk to them then.
But I’m beyond thinking it will help.
If America wants to avoid utter catastrophe it is going to have to do a lot more than throw the First Family Lumpen-Trash in jail. It’s going to have to get rid of the jails, too, and the systems for keeping them full.
It’s going to have to not just re-fund the education system but completely reform it so their children learn not what to think but how.
It’s going to have to jail, exile, or guillotine a lot of billionaires and a lot of their running dogs with them, and those feckers will be slippery to catch.
And it’s going to have to do all that without simply setting up another system of power bases with a new set of tyrants at the top table, a new class of the-animals-that-are-more-equal-than-others.
It could be done, but it would require a lot of humility and I just don’t think there’s enough to go around, in that place.
Good luck, though. We’ll watch the American collapse from Australia with our hearts in our mouths, because it will be our turn next.
© Kirsten Tona
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