Start here: I am not a Trump fan-boy. Never was, and, while I haven’t written much here lately, you can follow my trajectory of Trump affination in these pages over the last five years. At first I feared what everyone does: Demagogue becomes tyrant. Willie wrote a story about that. Instead, Trump has become the great Federalist – as exhibited most extremely this year in his responses both to the Coronavirus and to this Summer’s riots.
With that said, I am fascinated by the man in ways that surprise me. Trump taught me what I want in a politician: Puts Ci on tilt. It was Sarah Palin who first showed us that, but we didn’t know what we were seeing. Trump puts Ci on tilt simply by existing, and that has proved hugely edifying. When he’s on his game, he deflects every Ci display – every order they give him. Frustrated displays escalate and amplify – and here we are.
I think the President is Id, but I can surmise, instead, that he is Di affecting Id as his table image – in other words, that he is perfectly executing a long con. How perfectly? For years now, I have been assiduously watching for just those tells – for giveaways that Trump is Di affecting Id, playing Queens-dumb to sucker the city-slickers. They seem to be there, sometimes, too; for example when Barr shares the press-briefing podium.
But: I am led to today’s analysis by a remark I saw on Twitter: “Have you ever known Trump not to be prepared?” I never have the impression that Donald Trump is ever fully-prepared for anything. I am a sales monster, and I evaluate him that way. He has two speeds: Winging it, when he likes what he’s talking about, and phoning it in, when he doesn’t. He has deft speechwriters, but he kicks their words around like pebbles in a parking lot, killing time until the next impulse to ramble off script.
Here’s the truth of Trump and of Trumpism globally: If old-school politics is Hollywood for ugly people, Trumpian politics is stand-up comedy – without the rehearsal. Invented by whom? Rush Limbaugh. If you see Trump’s political persona as a talk radio show, it all comes together, both the seeming incoherence and the resonance with the audience.
We are what we habitually do, and I think Trump is always under-prepared because he has always been able to dominate in negotiation by over-whelming Alpha frame – charisma. That’s his magic bullet. He prepares in the meeting – hence so much golf – and closes at the end. The prepared presentation is so much Christmas wrapping, to be torn through to get to the real toy.
So with that as introduction, here’s the crux of the matter: What, if any, is Trump’s grand strategy to extricate himself from this election mess and right the Republic? I do believe he’s in the right, so the question turns on how well-prepared he was to have been robbed of this election, and how well-prepared he is to respond.
I give you three theories: Trump Raw, The Clancy Climax and Federalism’s Bludgeon.
Trump Raw is WWE Raw, scripted and yet unfiltered. What you see is what you get, and the “plan” was to wing it: Chaff the skies, flip the script and roll the bones in court. If this seems to correspond perfectly to what is actually happening, that just might be a clue to what is actually happening.
The Clancy Climax is a species of internet wet dreams: Dominion is real and Trump watched the vote theft happening in real time from a SCIF (why?) near the White House. When the music swells, he will reveal all, healing the nation. This assumes a maximally Di long con from Trump, as well as an external reality that hews perfectly to the script.
Federalism’s Bludgeon, by contrast, uses the U.S. Constitution for its script: Kill the clock, either forcing Republican state legislatures to prefer the Trump electors or forcing the entire Congress, by turns, to vote by state delegations for Trump and Pence. Another long con, albeit not as sexy, but the loyalty and resilience expected of Republican politicians seems implausible.
Both The Clancy Climax and Federalism’s Bludgeon yearn for a RICO-style roll-up of the Democratic National Committee in Act III, dozens of coordinated raids of Biden, Obama, the Clintons, all of the election fraudsters and their foreign underwriters. Is this the furthest stretch of all? The Trump Administration has executive orders on just this subject: On the prosecution and, especially, expropriation of anyone associated with foreign-influenced electoral crimes.
I like Trump Raw, frankly, because I think that’s just the way Trump is wired. Trump’s defense team seems to be working from Federalism’s Bludgeon, but that was an ugly pipe dream until the discovery of Dominion. The script is fully flipped: The election is a joke, world-wide, regardless of what anyone on TV says. Every new discovery of every sort of cheating makes delay more tenable, haste more suspicious – where a pacific delay is all Federalism’s Bludgeon requires, stipulating Republican legislators with spines and Democrats who do not terrorize their homes and families.
If The Clancy Climax is real, the time for the big blow-off was the morning after the election, to maximize national unity and to minimize entrenched resistance. We are now at a legitimacy crisis – the risk that half or more of the nation will reject Biden as a criminal imposter – and it is hard to imagine a planned-out strategy that could have avoided this impasse but did not.
I think Trump has Octavian’s problem, by now: Unless there is a very convincing big reveal of the cheating, the president will have crossed the actual Rubicon by over-whelming political power. China Joe puts Comrade Xi in charge of America, so there is much to be gained by appealing to Octavian. But once Octavian is Augustus, the Republic is gone, all but in pantomime.
