I SEE NO REASON TO FORGET THE TREASON

In 1951, Hannah Arendt anticipated the process that Donald Trump would use to take control of the Republican Party and try to overturn the results of a presidential election.  She wrote, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi… but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

It took seven decades, and a lot of help from people like Rupert Murdoch and Rush Limbaugh, but after only five years in politics, Donald Trump has created a nation of rubes – over 70 million of them – who believe in his bizarro-world America.  74 million citizens are having a mass hallucination.  They looked at the least intelligent, least competent, most dishonest president in our nation’s history, a man whose criminal negligence has led to over 250,000 avoidable deaths, and they wanted more.  I’m still at a loss to explain it. 

OK, it was a “middle finger election,” and it’s no surprise that Trump’s people have signed onto the  I understand the “fuck your feelings” attitude.  I get wanting to own the libs, and I get that losing sucks.  But how do they get from there to Crazy Town?  A Republican who is still tethered to reality might say, “I don’t understand Biden’s appeal.  Why did so many people vote for him?”  That’s a fair question, for which there are many reasonable answers.  Come, let us reason together!

But there’s no reasoning with people who argue, in effect, “I don’t like it, and therefore it didn’t happen.”  They’ll embrace absurd, impossible conspiracy theories rather than accept the fact that 81+ million people voted for Joe Biden. 

Where did those votes come from?  Apparently millions of Americans have embraced the existence of a hypothetical plot against Donald Trump, led by the Chinese government and abetted by the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.  Those worthies coordinated with the usual rogues gallery of Q bogeymen – Hunter Biden, the Clintons, the Obamas, the Bushes, George Soros and Bill Gates – as well as the entire Democratic Party and all of mainstream media.  Only in this bizarro world, Fox is now part of MSM, and some prominent Republicans are part of the conspiracy as well.  Seriously, who can you trust these days?    

Among the many ludicrous aspects of this theory is that it only works if several thousand people (at a minimum) keep the secret.  Surely at least one co-conspirator would have cracked by now, either through simple carelessness, or to cash in on the reward money that Republicans have promised in return for evidence of election fraud.  I wouldn’t do that, or course; my lips are sealed.  But I’m surprised that some conspirator with fewer scruples hasn’t flipped. I guess that just proves how powerful the conspiracy is.

Not all Republicans are gullible enough to swallow this whole.  Some of them are fundraising off the conspiracy theory.  Others are terrified of physical violence from feral Trumpers.  And all of them fear a primary challenge from some Q-addled Instagram influencer that might derail their gravy train.  But I feel safe in saying that anyone who pushes the theory that this election was stolen from Donald Trump is either crazy, stupid, dishonest, or all three. There’s nothing patriotic, or even conservative about their clown car coup.  Given a choice between preserving American democracy and keeping Trump in power, Republicans will choose Trump every time.   

Of course, there are risks involved in that choice as well.We seem to have begun the Reign of Terror phase of Trump’s interregnum.I mean, jeez, when even Bill Barr is under suspicion, no one outside the immediate family is safe.And Barron might want to watch his back.