The Bigly, Boy-Child Criminal, Pt. II

The latest round of head-scratching by the media is just as head-scratching itself. The most recent question that seems to have stumped them, after the failed former president’s booking and mug shot in Georgia, is why he seems to have abandoned his cohorts in crime, all of those who tried to help him attempt to overturn the will of the voters and install himself as president—in an election he lost by nearly eight million votes. This newest round of “what is he thinking?” is especially unfathomable considering everything that is known about the twice-impeached, quadruple-indicted loser. The general assumption seems to be that because Trump aspires to be a mob boss, that he actually will act like a mob boss. But nothing could be further from the truth, because in order to be a mob boss a person first has to be an adult. Trump has been crippled by narcissism his entire life and it has led him to lose far more money than he ever made. Not very mob-boss-like behavior. He’s a congenital idiot who can barely read, a child of five in a man’s body, and because of that he’s never going to act like an adult—mob boss or no—he’s going to act like a child of five. And there’s no more indicative precedent to explain his behavior than what he did after losing the 2020 election; he cried like a baby and claimed that it didn’t happen, that he didn’t really lose. Trump’s defense for every one of his criminal acts has been the same: “I didn’t do it!” Why would anyone at this point think that his defense in the four criminal trials will be any different?

The first thing that has to be understood is that Trump doesn’t care who turns on him or why. In fact, the more of his minions who turn on him the more it helps his case—or so he thinks. They are going to argue that what they did they did at Trump’s behest. But like a five-year-old, Trump is going to assert just as vigorously that he had no idea what they were doing, and that of course they are going to want to blame him in order to divert guilt from themselves. And the more of them that pile on, the more it will appear—in the desolate vacuum that passes for his brain—that his defense is working. But even more baffling for the media is why he doesn’t help the rest of his co-conspirators with their legal bills so that they will remain loyal to him. For the answer to that, refer back to point number one. Paying the legal bills of the other criminals—in Trump’s mind—would only make it look as if he has a reason to pay them. And he probably has a point: quid pro quo. Helping his confederates financially would obviously make it seem as if he is one of them. For his planned defense to work, however, he can’t pay them anything. And he’s already previewed that defense on Troth Senchal: he didn’t do anything, they did it all on their own, and he doesn’t even know who these people are. Given that, why would he give them any money?

Like every other employee throughout his entire life, Trump is going to leave the people who worked for him twisting in the wind. He doesn’t care about them because he doesn’t care about anyone or anything other than himself. He is going to continue to cry like a baby—as he has for his entire life—and continue to claim that he didn’t do anything wrong. That’s it. That’s the whole defense, primarily because there is no defense for his indefensible acts. He’s going to continue to grift his followers out of hard-earned money they can ill-afford to give him to pay his legal bills, and give them absolutely nothing in return. Perhaps the reason that Trump felt he hadn’t committed quid pro quo with Ukraine, is that’s he’s entirely unfamiliar with the concept. Taking, he understands. Giving back, what the hell is that? The biggest problem the news media is having in attempting to get inside Trump’s head, is that there’s nothing there to get into. Attempting to analyze his actions in terms of adult behavior is never going to work . . . because he’s a child! Figuring out why Trump does anything only necessitates looking at the behavior of a five-year-old. There’s no strategy; there’s no game of wits going on—primarily because he’s witless—and there’s no master plan. There’s just denial. Why this continues to elude the news media is beyond me, because there’s nothing simpler to figure out than a simpleton.

The Capitalist Corporate Control Party

For anyone of my generation or older the initials CCCP immediately bring to mind the Russian abbreviation for the Soviet Union. But the CCCP is making a comeback, not only in Russia itself, where Putin is attempting to get the old band back together—totally against their will, naturally—but also in this country where a new attempt at totalitarian control is at a crucial point in its evolution. For anyone who still believes the Cold War propaganda that the Soviet Union was a Communist nation, it’s long past time to wake up and smell the borscht. It wasn’t Marxism that failed in the Soviet Union, it was totalitarian dictatorship. One-party rule, in the guise of socialism, is what finally brought down the last of the European empires, when the colonized peoples who were unlucky enough to share a border with Russia finally had enough and kicked out their oppressors from Moscow for good. It was a lesson that Great Britain had already learned as they gradually allowed their empire to become a commonwealth before it revolted as well. For some reason, however, the capitalist oligarchy in the United States still believes it has a chance to bind and oppress America’s citizens in a one-party, totalitarian state, this time in the guise of Capitalism, without anyone noticing. But hey, I guess hope springs eternal.

The most important thing for the average American citizen to realize about their country right now, is that they are in the midst of a hostile takeover . . . from within. The corporate oligarchy that has been attempting a slow-moving coup since the fifties, had their finely detailed plans derailed by the Trump presidency, primarily because Trump is such an abject moron. The initial goal of people like Charles Koch and his ilk was to follow up the George W. Bush presidency with more of the same. But the presidential pendulum swings of the post-Reagan era have been impossible for them to control. Every time the capitalist right-wing has been able to install a friendly executive, the resultant undermining of American progressive values has prompted an opposite electoral swing, fist to Clinton, then to Obama, and most recently to Biden. It’s a difficult phrase to say about a criminal and seditionist, but it may be that the Trump era will be looked at by historians as a blessing in disguise. Capitalism’s Republican tools in the Senate and House are abundant, willing to do anything for their right-wing corporate employers, well-paid fronts who will gladly sell out the electorate to pave the way for a capitalist utopia in which the rich enslave the rest of America. But it was Trump who stole the election out from under them in 2016 by pandering to racists, xenophobes, Christian fascists, and international isolationists, and then presided over the worst administration in U.S. presidential history. That’s why Koch is going to such lengths to undercut Trump—not because he’s pro-democracy, but because Trump is ruining his plans.

The unpredictability of the electorate has convinced the wealthy elite that voters need to be taken out of the equation all together. The plan is a delicate one, as it seeks to gerrymander districts at the state level, disenfranchise voters nationwide, sow dissention in the electorate through fanning the flames of wedge issues that make absolutely no difference to the corporate elite, all without being too obvious. The objective, as the Frankfurt School demonstrated a hundred years ago, is to keep the people of this country fighting with each other so that they won’t be able to fight against the systemic control that the right-wing is wresting away from the people. The hope was that Americans would suddenly wake up one day only to realize that they were now living in a totalitarian state that works only for corporate wealth, and yet have no idea how they got there. But Donald Trump is such a monumental idiot that he upended the game board and scattered the pieces of the capitalist coup all over the floor for everyone to see. He’s so tremendously stupid he didn’t realize that by attempting become a dictator before the electoral system had been completely rigged in favor of the right, that he inadvertently exposed what has been going on all this time and galvanized the majority against him. Trump’s four indictments may have hardened the support of his base, but it’s whittled away everyone else who might have voted for him otherwise—not a huge number of voters, but hopefully enough to keep Democrats in control.

And this has created a seemingly insurmountable problem for Koch and his comrades. Trump’s base isn’t a Republican base, it’s a Trump base. Nearly thirty percent of Republican voters have no interest in voting for anyone else but Trump. So, given that, how do the capitalist tools that are running for the Republican nomination gain a footing in the Republican primaries against Trump? The short answer is, they can’t. By trying to appeal to Trump voters by parroting the same MAGA talking points they only reinforce the vote for Trump (DeSantis and Haley), and by setting themselves against Trump they effectively eliminate themselves from the nomination (Christie and Hutchinson). As bad as Trump would be for the CCCP in the general election, things are even worse for them if he’s prevented from being on the ballot. The wave of support for Trump’s exclusion from holding office via the Fourteenth Amendment is gaining momentum on both sides of the political spectrum and promises gut the Republican turnout in the general election far more than if the failed former president winds up campaigning from a jail cell. As far as the corporate elite is concerned, Trump is the proverbial turd in the punchbowl; you can’t just fish him out and pretend that things are back to normal, because no one is going to drink from that bowl again. So that only leaves them with a set of Republican candidates who are uniformly unelectable—as demonstrated by the first primary debate Wednesday night.

The lineup of corporate automatons onstage in Milwaukee was like a new Disney exhibit: the Hall of Losers. They all stand in front of the crowd and fight to see who can make the most outrageous lies, leaning in to climate denial and lies about the economy on the one hand, and valiantly vowing to fight against hot-button cultural issues that have been manufactured by them in the first place on the other. They take credit for Democratic successes and then lie about the work the Democrats are doing for the American people—the only work being done for the people, by the way, as Republicans have no interest in people at all. After a mention of the catastrophe in Hawaii not one single candidate expressed any sympathy at all for the people who died—not one. But they sure care about oil companies. And while they breathlessly vow to fight for human lives unborn, at the same time they unabashedly vow to fight just as passionately to deny any aid to the children they want to force to be born. But then the CCCP has always been a party that hates people, especially Americans, and sees them as only fit to be wage slaves in a corporate haven free of taxation and regulation. Perhaps a better name for the exhibit would be the Hall of Haters.

But the worst of the bunch was easily Vivek Ramaswamy because his positions are so obviously contrived and phony, the CCCP attempting to put their own version of Trump in the White House—but someone they control. The nickname Vivek the Fake is an appropriate moniker for the wealthy tech entrepreneur who has been induced to dabble in politics this cycle. After all, if Trump could do it, why not Ramaswamy? Pod Save America host Dan Pfeiffer has had the best take on this pre-fabricated candidate:

          [Ramaswamy] is an interesting experiment. He believes none of this. He didn’t even vote in 2016
          or 2012. He voted for the Libertarian candidate in 2004. This is some sort of experiment in reverse
          engineering a candidacy, where you go see what the voters want, and then you build a campaign
          platform to fit that. Because politicians enter political races at a point in which they have a record,
          what they’re really doing is taking—to use a bad business metaphor—they take a product and see
          [how] it fits with the market. What Vivek did was look at the market and built a product that fit the
          market. And that’s what all of this is . . . He understands, better than the rest of these people, what
          the [Republican] electorate wants, which is an outsider, who’s not a politician, who wants to burn
          the system down. And that’s what he sounds like. (Pfeiffer)

But to what end? If Republican voters want someone to burn the system down they already have their cult leader in Trump. In the end Ramaswamy has no better chance of becoming the nominee that the rest of the corporate company men, and woman, who came up through the usual political channels. Ramaswamy may be the new Terminator T-1000, but as everyone who’s seen the second Terminator movie knows—spoiler alert—the old T-800 beats him in the end.

One of the major questions that is asked frequently by some progressive commentators is, “Why are these people running if they have absolutely no shot at winning?” And no one seems to have a good answer for them. But the thing that has struck me from the very beginning of the campaign—especially with the cast of vacuous, clown-car candidates who have thrown their hats in the ring, is that they’re all secretly hoping that Trump is convicted, or otherwise excluded from the ballots in a majority of states. Once that happens, there would be a mad scramble to anoint a new Republican nominee, and those who are running now hope to find an empty seat when the music stops. That is the only answer that makes any sense at all. As Republican strategist Sarah Longwell said on Pod Save America, “By some measures, up to seventy percent of the Republican Party, they believe that Donald Trump won last time” (Longwell). So, as far as the Republican electorate are concerned, these candidates are essentially running against an incumbent, something that rarely happens in presidential politics because it’s such an impossible task. The only conclusion to draw from that, then, is that they’re counting on Trump not making it to the convention a year from now. The only alternative suggestion, that they’re hoping to get name recognition for a 2028 race, seems too far-fetched, as losing badly this time around would hardly seem to be a springboard to success in future races—as well as being incredibly naïve to think that Trump won’t keep on running, and losing, until the day he dies.

The glimmer of hope for the rest of us, however, is that the debacle that the capitalist oligarchs find themselves in has resulted in awakening many people to the fact that if we don’t act now, together, it might soon be too late. Challenges in courts of nearly every red state to counteract voter suppression laws have been steadily increasing. And the electoral victories in the wake of attempted abortion bans are equally promising. But Democratic lawyer Marc Elias recently made a very sobering observation about the inability of the U.S. to provide a federal voting law that would instantly void all statewide attempts to disenfranchise voters: “I wish I could say there’s a solution other than to elect Democrats to your state legislatures, and encourage them to pass better, more expansive voting laws” (Elias). So, it really is up to us. Now that the CCCP plan has been exposed, Republicans have stopped trying to hide their agenda. They are now committed to a full-on assault on voter access before the rest of us realize what’s happening, lying all the way to achieve their goal, until they either win or they are defeated. As Robert Reich said, echoing Martin Luther King Jr., “America is now a hotbed of socialism. But it’s socialism for the rich. Everyone else is treated to harsh capitalism.” If the wealthy right-wing oligarchs in this country really are anti-socialist, then they need to stop syphoning off money from the rest of us through massive corporate welfare, and pay their fair share along with everyone else. But it’s up to us to make sure that happens before we find ourselves unwittingly living in a new kind of communist totalitarian regime, under the Capitalist Corporate Control Party.