Will There Be A Gen. Mark Milley To Stop The Next Trump?
Republicans attempted coup in 2020. They are now hard at work rectifying the mistakes they made.
by Justin Rosario
Last week’s revelation that Gen. Mark Milley planned to personally intervene if Trump tried to launch a nuclear missile has rattled some while reassuring others. This is not the first time a dangerously unstable Republican president has had someone in his administration insert themselves between a madman and nuclear armageddon. It will, however, almost certainly be the last time this is allowed to happen.
Republicans made a lot of mistakes in their attempted coup after the 2020 election. They are hard at work rectifying them as we speak in open anticipation of the next one.
If it succeeds, Gen. Milley’s actions will guide the actions of America’s last president/first dictator as surely as a roadmap.
The ‘Deep State’ that wasn’t
One of the first mistakes Trump made was filling his administration with people who were serious about their jobs. There were plenty of criminals of course; Trump holds the record for cabinet officials who resigned or were fired in disgrace. But Trump also hired people like Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, who despite being a vile racist refused to weaponize the Department of Justice for Trump’s personal benefit. Sessions unlike his successor Bill Barr, believed in the rule of law and stood up to Trump on several occasions.
By the end of his time in office Trump had replaced almost all of his staff with people who would do his bidding, no matter how illegal or insane his orders were. This is how the plot to launch a violent coup came about, and potentially why no one blew the whistle before it happened. Just ask Mark Meadows.
Another big mistake was made by the Republican Party writ large. When it became clear that their strategy was to steal the election, they did not bother to check to see if state level Republicans would support the effort. This led to officials ranging from Secretaries of State to local election boards refusing to throw out millions of ballots or decertify the results weeks after the election. This is akin to robbing a bank, jumping in the getaway car, and finding out your driver refuses to go over the speed limit or ignore red lights. Whoops.
Republicans are solving this problem as well. Steve Bannon, the racist mastermind behind the alt-right, is engineering a takeover of the GOP’s election process.
The solution, Bannon announced, was to seize control of the GOP from the bottom up. Listeners should flood into the lowest rung of the party structure: the precincts. “It’s going to be a fight, but this is a fight that must be won, we don’t have an option,” Bannon said on his show in May. “We’re going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct.”
Precinct officers are the worker bees of political parties, typically responsible for routine tasks like making phone calls or knocking on doors. But collectively, they can influence how elections are run. In some states, they have a say in choosing poll workers, and in others they help pick members of boards that oversee elections.
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ProPublica contacted GOP leaders in 65 key counties, and 41 reported an unusual increase in signups since Bannon’s campaign began. At least 8,500 new Republican precinct officers (or equivalent lowest-level officials) joined those county parties. We also looked at equivalent Democratic posts and found no similar surge.
It’s important to keep in mind two things: 1. These people are being explicitly motivated by The Big Lie that the election was stolen from Trump. 2. These are the same people who tell us in poll after poll that they are done with democracy.
In other words, the people angling to take control of elections at the local level are people with zero concern for election integrity. They do not think Black people should vote. They do not think Democrats can ever be legitimately elected. They see political violence as a proper exercise of power. In what universe would they consider it a bridge too far to tamper with the results to achieve the outcome they want?
There is every reason to believe that Republicans at the local level will be so brazen in their efforts, scenes like this will be caught on camera in hundreds of precincts:
The Republican Party does not attract the best and the brightest. It attracts those with the lowest moral fiber and a willingness to obey orders. If they don’t actually rig the tallies, these are people who will refuse to certify the results when told to by Trump, Tucker Carlson, or another right wing cult leader. You’ll know that the pawns are all in position when Republicans start making a lot of noise about protecting local election workers from being questioned. This is after engineering a months-long terror campaign against the current group of workers designed to drive out as many non-partisans as possible.
What Bannon is doing at the local level, Republicans are trying to do at the state level. Several candidates for Secretary of State in swing states are explicitly running on a platform of making sure the crime of 2020 never happens again. And by this, they don’t actually mean taking steps to make elections more secure (which would be difficult since 2020 was the most scrutinized and secure election in American history), they mean not allowing Democrats to win under any circumstances. Imagine the Dallas Cowboys being allowed to hire the referees for all of their games and the only qualification necessary is to say, out loud, that any game the Cowboys lose is due to cheating. How confident would you feel at the start of a game that the outcome would be fair?
This is a comprehensive strategy to steal elections. If Republicans can cheat enough to win, they’ll certify the vote no matter how obvious their fraud is. If Republicans fail to cheat enough to win, they’ll refuse to certify the vote and just declare themselves the winner anyway. This will be the Deep State Republicans whined about for 5 years. It cannot be repeated often enough: Every Republican accusation is a confession.
Once a Republican gets into the White House again, there is now a real chance that they will never leave. Especially after they take control of the military.
The Final Red Flag
The final and biggest mistake Trump and the GOP made was not corrupting the military. This is a mistake they cannot rectify right now but will surely correct immediately upon cheating their way back into power again.
Last year, Trump tried to initiate the first stages of a military coup and failed spectacularly. He had not bothered to lay the groundwork, possibly assuming, as president, the military would simply do his bidding. Later, just weeks before the election, Gen. Milley made it abundantly clear that the military would not side with Trump if he were to declare the results null and void and try to seize power. It’s true that someone (see Lt. Gen. Charles Flynn) may have held up the National Guard for hours in order to let the terrorist attack on the Capitol continue. But holding the military back and having the military actively assist are two very different things (both are still treason, though).
Should the next Republican president start to systematically replace military leadership with loyalists, they may as well be announcing to the world that they do not plan to leave office. They will be laying the groundwork for invoking the Insurrection Act for when they feel compelled to declare a national emergency. National emergencies are of course how dictators grant themselves extraordinary powers, like arresting the opposition and critics and remaining in office forever.
Once this corruption of the military begins, it will be time to leave the country. Even if Republicans are forced out of office by the ballot or protests over rigged elections, they will have set the stage for a military coup by the most powerful armed forces in human history. Gen. Mark Milley averted a nightmare scenario but it is all but guaranteed that Republicans learned a valuable lesson about how to get it right next time. And next time there will be no Gen. Mark Milley to stop them.
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Matt Taibbi Says George W. Bush Was 'Worse Than Trump'. He's Wrong, And Here's Why.
Taibbi insist that liberals are giving George W. Bush a pass, but he has an ulterior motive to do so.
by Ben Cohen
He [George W. Bush] was also a worse and more destructive president than Donald Trump, and it wasn’t close. - Matt Taibbi
Much has been made of Matt Taibbi’s political transformation in recent times. Some ascribe financial motivation, others a more unhinged disdain for the “corporate Dems” — the nefarious cabal of puppet masters (read: Hillary Clinton) working in collusion with big business and the military industrial complex to destroy the working class etc, etc.
It is impossible to know why Taibbi has spent a good part of five years trashing his journalistic reputation, but it has been remarkable to watch. When a bright and talented person spends his days spreading grotesque right wing propaganda it is a warning sign to other reporters that even the best of us can get trapped in an ideological bubble and owned by our most rabid fans.
Taibbi’s latest attempt to rewrite history is, if you look closely, an attempt to rationalize his descent into the Alt Left grifting world — a place where rogue journalists monetize far left outrage and good journalism goes to die.
The Trump denialism grift
For most well-adjusted people it was obvious that Donald Trump was a wannabe tyrant who would do anything in his power to destroy democracy in America. This was not the case for Taibbi, who instead focused all his attention on the people freaking out about it. Just as Bernie Sanders’ fanatical fans insisted Hillary Clinton was “just as bad” as Donald Trump, Taibbi jumped on board and began a reality distorting campaign to distract attention away from the clear danger Trump presented.
When Trump won the presidency it was immediately clear that the American democratic experiment was in severe crisis. When a deeply damaged, power hungry narcissist assumes a position of power, history shows they never, ever let it go. The Alt Left on the other hand seemed relish the upending of the US political system. It was all the establishment’s fault and America’s elites were about to get a much deserved lesson they had been itching to teach them…
Republicans can try, but they will fail! They don't seem to realize that they woke up a sleeping giant in the American electorate not liking their plans of taking power. After 2016, voters have kept sending the GOP a clear message that they do not like it when politicians and political parties try to cheat their way into office, and have told them that through their votes.
And with the way the Biden administration has been successful in giving Americans help and hope, as well as the way Republicans have miserably handled the COVID pandemic, most Americans aren't up for the GOP's asshole games any longer. As long as Democrats keep their eyes on the prize, as Biden and Pelosi are showing, Republicans WILL. NOT. SUCCEED!