Trump Is Going To Lose But The Fight's Not Over

Take some time. Work on soothing your frazzled nerves. Put yourself back together again. Then stand back up and get back to work.

by Justin Rosario

It’s Wednesday morning and things are...less than optimal. Don’t get me wrong, Trump is going to lose. He’s circling the drain in Wisconsin and Michigan, falling behind with no place to pick up new votes. It’s just a matter of time until they call it. The same appears to be happening in Nevada. Last night’s loss of Arizona was a crippling blow to the Trump campaign and now their path to victory is dwindling as you read this.

Actually, it’s pretty much closed. Biden needs to win Michigan and Trump is down with all of the mail-in ballots yet to be counted. Sure, Trump’s lawyers are going to try and stop the counting but good luck with that. They may get a judge to stop late ballots from being counted but they’ll never get them all thrown out. And thanks to Trump spending more than six months telling Republican voters not to use mail-in voting, we can be pretty sure those uncounted ballots will not break for Mr. “Mail-In Voting Is Voter Fraud.” 

After that, any state Biden wins will just be gravy. Then the real fight starts.

Obstruction On Steroids

As of right now, it does not look like we will be able to retake the Senate. That’s going to be a serious problem. Republicans will not, under any circumstances, work with a Biden administration. No judges confirmed, no bills passed, no budgets considered. Don’t even think about a Covid relief bill or lifting a finger to stop the coming economic implosion set up by Trump and the GOP. 

As far as Republicans are concerned, the worse things get, the better. It’s how they get reelected. It’s always how they get reelected. Break everything, stop Democrats from fixing the damage, and then blame them for the mess.

This time will be worse because now that they’ve stacked the courts with extremist judges, Biden won’t even be able to use executive orders to do anything. Trump was able to enact most of his blatantly unconstitutional agenda via EOs but my guess is that the same judges who said a president can do just about anything will suddenly decide to impose strict limits on the powers of the Executive Branch.

I would not be surprised if they agree Trump is allowed to fire tens of thousands of civil servants under his new “Schedule F” scheme and stuff the government with rabid partisans eager to sabotage the Biden administration. “Deep State” indeed.

The GOP is incapable of governing but it thrives on obstruction. The very broken status quo benefits the rich and the powerful so preventing Democrats from doing anything is exactly what Republicans want. Being in charge let’s them do some extra looting but slowly bleeding the country works just as well.

A massive repudiation of Trump and the GOP was the only thing that might have forced the GOP to rethink its current course. Since that didn’t happen, Republicans have zero incentive to change course and every reason to fully embrace open white nationalism and fascism. Expect QAnon to rapidly take over the party and tacit, if not explicit, endorsement of the coming domestic terrorism from right wing extremists.

And why not? They paid no real price for it. Yet.

The Price

Once upon a time, a decade ago, Republicans convinced enough Democratic voters that the Democratic Party didn’t deserve their vote in the midterms and the GOP took over the House of Representatives. 

They did this by lying, nonstop, about why the economy was in poor shape. Some of them, I kid you not, blamed Obama for the Great Recession as if he were president at the time. Some of them still do this a decade later!

Naturally, Republicans failed to mention that they were blocking efforts to fix the mess their policies had caused and the press rewarded them with uncritical coverage of their lies. At the same time, almost no one was held responsible for the criminal activity in the Bush regime or in the private sector. We had to “look forward.”

That cannot happen this time. While Republicans can refuse to pass any bills, they cannot stop Biden’s Department of Justice from purging Bill Barr’s corruption and then investigating it. Republicans also cannot stop criminal investigations into Trump regime officials and the people who enabled their activities. Senate Republicans are free to hold their inevitable sham hearings into Hunter Biden’s Magical Multiplying Laptops but without a friendly DoJ to hide behind, all of their shady deals are ripe for exposure, as well.

The GOP will howl about political persecution but it’s not clear that this will resonate beyond their base. The criminality of the Trump regime is widely understood by the public and the Republican Party’s role in it is well known, even to people who don’t pay that much attention to politics. Maybe they shouldn’t have acquitted Trump in such an obviously corrupt way?

While all of this is going on, we, Democratic voters, have to continue to be on our guard. There will be yet another concerted effort by rat fuckers to convince us not to vote in the midterms.

Keep Resisting

We will be told that Biden is a failure. That he is selling us out to the corporations. That he is too old. There will be a deluge of bullshit being thrown at us. Ignore it.

Biden does not require blind obedience and Democrats do not require mindless support but there’s a difference between honest criticism and propaganda. Pay attention to the final numbers of this election and you will see why Republicans will be working so hard to suppress the vote going forward.

Younger voters came out in droves and they did not support the GOP. Gen Y and Gen Z went overwhelmingly to the left. So did women. One can expect a significant shift among women back to the center assuming future Republican candidates don’t run around screaming “Grab’em by the pussy!”, but the youth-ish vote (Gen Y ain’t that young anymore) is lost to them pretty much forever. They may not love Democrats but they really hate Republicans.

What do you suppose is going to happen when the GOP spends the next 4 years with Trump as their leader still because he’ll announce his “Trump 2024” campaign by Christmas? Will younger voters be less likely to vote, or more? Even after Trump is finally gone, the GOP’s coming war on contraception may cost them the majority of women voters for the next couple of decades, anyway.

But that will take time; time during which we have to vote, and keep voting. The goal of the GOP will be to discourage voters and convince them to tune it all out. That is why Trump spews a constant firehose of hate and rage and nonsense on an hourly basis. He wants to overwhelm us and make us shut down. Now that Republicans know how well that works, they will almost certainly try the same tactic spread across their entire, very well-funded, network of political operatives. 

Block it out and stay focussed on what matters: Removing Republicans from office and taking away their power to hurt us.

The Trump Trainwreck’s Last Stop

The last four years have been brutal. The next two months will be even worse as a furious, humiliated, and terrified Trump lashes out. He will seek to inflict as much pain and suffering as he can before trying to evad prosecution for his numerous crimes. Don’t be surprised if Trump either casts himself as a messianic cult figure surrounded at all times by loyalists willing to kill and die for him or flees the country, declaring himself a president-in-exile whose rightful place in the Oval Office was “stolen.”

But once he’s out of the White House, Trump will just be another racist moron, screaming his hate at the clouds. He won’t be able to torture children. He won’t be able to subvert foreign policy on behalf of Russia. He won’t be able to cripple the government (more than he already has).

Trump will probably still control the GOP but he won’t be able to do a damn thing to the rest of us. That nightmare will be over. Take some time. Work on soothing your frazzled nerves. Put yourself back together again. Then stand back up and get back to work. The Republican Party has to be stamped out of existence.

NOTE FROM BEN: I wanted to take a moment to thank Banter Members for their extraordinary support over the past four years. We pledged to spend every ounce of our energy fighting Donald Trump, and your financial support has enabled us to do just that. We would not be here without you, so a huge, heartfelt thanks from all of us.

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- Ben