Have you been watching the January 6 hearings? I haven't, at least not giving it my full attention. It has been clear to me for some time that Trump actively encouraged the storming of the capital by a frenzy of angry and entitled (if misinformed) supporters prepared for mayhem that weird day in early 2021, and that he did not particularly care what violence might come out of it-- even suggesting that the lynching of his vice president might not be a bad thing. But while I assumed that this was due to a misunderstanding on his part about how elections (or civil society) work, I have learned that by not tuning into the hearings fully (they were on in the background at different points of the evening but when it comes to the emissions of our media and our elite these days I was by force of habit tuning them out), I missed a pretty solid case being made for Trump's team acting, on Trump's orders, as though they believed he had really won the election while knowing based on the incontrovertible facts at their disposal that he had in fact lost. I had to check my complete cynicism in order to grasp that this is pretty significant stuff. It means that Trump on January 6 was apparently engaging in a coup, attempting to use the power of his office to subvert the will of the people through violence since the results of November were not muddled enough to permit him to go the Bush 2000 route of using his stacked Supreme Court to reverse his loss.
What has become clearer to me as I have caught the snippets of January 6-ers explicitly acknowledging that they were taking orders from Trump (who in his speech before the attack I was reminded promised to be shoulder to shoulder with the stormers as they breeched the capitol whereas in actuality he merely skittered back to the white house to watch the proceedings on tv from the comfy remove of his la-z-boy), is what fascism looks like. Brothers and sisters, it looks like you and me.
Whether he realizes it or not, Trump's novel approach to winning an election is akin to Joe Biden's assertion on Charlemagne tha God's radio show two summers ago, in the course of a campaign in which his only promise was that if he were elected nothing would fundamentally change for his donors, that if you weren't for Joe Biden, "you ain't black."
Does it ever occur to any of these people that in order to win elections, rather than taking it out of the people-- taking them for granted when they’re not taking advantage of them, lying to them when they’re not abusing them, antagonizing them when they’re not disrespecting their intelligence, browbeating them when they're not manipulating their numbers-- maybe for a change they should try delivering for them instead?
When no one is on the people's side, where do the people go? In an age of conflict and rancor and confusion, they go to certainty-- even if in Trump's case that way lies Chaos. Chaos got a bit of a holiday in the last election when voters by a substantial margin chose Boring in hopes that Boring would be a change they could believe in, but back to Chaos they will surely go if Boring stops working for them. How is it working for you lately?
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