What’s Really Behind the Debate Game?
It’s not what you might think.
There’s been a lot of misunderstanding of what happened in the first debate. The general interpretation seems to be that Trump lost ground in the campaign, by his debased, out-of-control behavior. On the contrary, he achieved his aim: to cast more doubt on the legitimacy of any electoral outcome, and thus spur on his ardent supporters to increase the scope of their interference with the electoral process.
The misunderstanding here is the reasonable assumption that he’s trying to win the election. No so: the election is falling out of reach for Trump, and such a politically astute demagogue has to recognize that. What he wants is not to win the vote, whether popular or electoral, but to have it thrown out.
The best interpretation of behavior, especially from a non-demented person, is that a goal fiercely pursued is almost certainly the goal that is actually desired. In this case, if we try to understand what Trump is doing in his terms, it’s perfectly obvious. He’s not doing anything that a candidate in an election would ordinarily do–accomplishing nothing as a President, making no pretense of governing, organizing rallies that can rally no one but the faithful who are a clear minority, even for the electoral vote.
So to get to the point: his strategy, which as the full support of his advisors and most of the Republican Party, to destroy the election. His goal is to create such chaos in the electoral process, encourage so much distrust, and instigate so much violence, that his forces can assert that no acceptable vote count has been achieved. To take an example less familiar than the ongoing attempt to render the Post Office unable to deliver ballots on time: millions of dollars are being spent by the Right wing to target misinformation, such as about the actual date of the election, or the calumniated, photoshopped versions of Biden, to the sociological grouping (black people especially) whose participation must be reduced. Reduce participation; impeach the validity of votes that have been cast: that’s the non-campaign of the GOP.
When voters are confused or misled, where believable vote counts are not reported, or at least one Party to the process refuses to accept them, what then happens? That Party rejects the vote reports and sues to prevent their acceptance by whomever is required to certify them. And if election officials in Blue or maybe Blue states insist on going forward, the Party will sue to stop the process. This is already happening with respect to the counting of mail-in ballots.
But this will not be Gore v. Bush. The goal will not be to produce an accurate count, but to say that such is not possible, and that the entire election result, such as it may be, must therefore be thrown out.
This rejection of the popular election as inherently fraudulent and irredeemably confused will go to the Federal Appeals courts, a majority of which are now Republican-controlled. Whatever happens in those courts, there will certainly be differing outcomes, which will then go to the Supreme Court to be adjudicated.
And this is what is now being prepared: this is what History will call “The Amy Barrett Strategy.” it is out in the open with her refusal to recuse herself. No 4–4 ties with Roberts betraying the cause once again. In this reckoning a 5–4 Court will uphold the rejection of the alleged Democratic victory by the Appeals Courts that did so. And under the Constitution, where does an indecisive election total go, when there is no “majority” whose claims have not been rejected by their opponents?
It goes to the House of Representatives, where each state gets only a single vote for whichever Party has a majority of its seats: One vote for Wyoming, one vote for California. The egalitarian Elephant and Donkey stew: one Elephant, one Donkey. And the House will choose Donald Trump to be President: and, if he has his way, and the Republican Party follows along the lines it has unequivocally laid out, President-for-Life. I must admit here that I have not done my due diligence about state-by-state Party House membership, a painfully boring task that is below my pay grade–any volunteers? But at last informal count I got up to 26 states with a Republican majority. They probably have a better count: they know what they’re doing.
So that’s the end game: discredit the election, be upheld by the Supreme Court, and throw it to the House.
And thus trying to convince “independent” voters that Democrat Joe Biden is not of the Left will not get it done. The Right–the militias, the Administration’s armed entities, the cops, the Aryans–are not out there a for a game of patty-cake. They’re the avant garde of Fascism. Any Resistance–calling out the States’ National Guards to protect the ballot boxes or the counting houses in blue states — will be met with armed force of the President’s Praetorian Guard from DHS, the FBI, Red states, and right-wing militias.
Local police forces, under leaderships solidly behind the President, will do the dirty work in big cities, all in the name of “Law and Order.” Which, to paraphrase Justice Robert Jackson, “exist only in the graveyard.” And as we have seen in recent months, the Democratic Governors and Mayors, to a man and woman, have unanimously surrendered their authority to the invaders and their own police forces–the latter of who, have undoubtedly threatened them with an uprising of lethal force if they don’t fall In line.
This is what Donald Trump is seeing as he looks down the line: a Revolution of his own creation. How will we stop him? Not by invoking “Democracy” or “The Constitution.” Trump’s fervent supporters have long since decided that those are the enemy. As one author who recently completed an in-depth study of those supporters notes, “…they are not economically marginalized …They have a strong concept that there is a core America, a concept which I suppose you could summarize as white, rural, John Wayne, football and hunting…”
And they will do anything to preserve or recapture that core from the vast pedophiliac and subversive conspiracy that their activists and spokespersons money-men have invented, a conspiracy straight out the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the farthest reaches of anti-“Communism; ” and often brought to us from Russia or Belarus or India. And whose Internet readers now number in the multi-millions.
What, then, is to be done?
Phil Green
(With thanks to Norman Rush, Rob Green, Senator Estes Kefauver, and author John Hibbings)
