COOP SCOOP Oct 30 The Downfall Edition
The Coop Scoop: The Downfall Edition
October 30, 2020
Issue #43
Just 5 days before what will be a cataclysmic series of national events, the election and its unknowable aftermath, an eerie quiet settles around an increasingly diseased nation.
Hard to believe that next Tuesday will mark the effective end of the Trump Administration and will begin the accountability process for its thugs and crimes that will stretch on for years. It most likely will mean the political exile of the Republican Party for a generation or more. And it will start the clock ticking for Joe Biden and the Democrats giving them no more than a year and a half to make some pretty radical changes in America or watch it – and their own political fortunes-- circle the drain.
Just as possible and hardly mutually exclusive, we might find ourselves a scant ten or fifteen days from now in the streets fighting to reclaim a battered democracy as a losing presidential candidate tries to overturn his defeat – by hook or by crook.
If thinking about THAT immediate future gives you a headache or a weak bladder, try pondering what the next few months have in store for us in terms of death and disease. This very week we are hitting all-time records in the number of COVID-19 infections, we are close to a mind blowing 100,000 new cases per day, closing in on 9 million total cases, and projecting a half million dead by late winter.
Forget about everything else. Pretend you know nothing about Donald Trump besides how he has bunged his response to the pandemic, and that alone should be enough for you to vote him out of office, drag him from the White House, prosecute him in a drumhead military court and summarily dispatch him a la Mussolini. S-l-o-w-l-y.
As fate would dictate, over this last month, the twin plagues that afflict us – Covid-19 and the Trump White House—finally clashed and converged becoming one mammoth superstorm. Just as the pandemic peaks to new highs, the Trump administration – that has already quietly adopted the let’em’die Herd Immunity option, announces publicly it cannot and will not control the virus, the president insults the intelligence of garden slugs stating “we are rounding the corner” and then his Science Office [sic] issues a staggering statement that Trump has, in fact, “ended the pandemic” and all at the same time the virus burns through the Midwest and the plains like raging firestorms.
In the clash and merger of those two plagues, the lesser of the two, Donald Trump and his absurdist campaign, was, in fact, consumed whole and ingested by the COVID Plague.
Indeed, credit for Trump’s certain defeat on Tuesday owes directly to the pandemic and secondarily to Trump himself. Let’s be real, the Democratic Resistance played almost no role in his downfall, other than to provide the voters at the last moment to deliver the coup de ’grace.
The pandemic possessed all the necessary attributes that the resistance lacked: a fierce focus on its mission, total cohesion, steely discipline, unblinking relentlessness, and a strong killer instinct. I cannot think of a single individual, outside of maybe Pee Wee Herman, who would be less fit to serve as president facing the scale of the COVID challenge. Neither he nor Trump would pose much of a challenge to the power of the virus.
With that virus knocking more insistently at our doors, completely disrupting everyday life, and reaping a daily heavy toll of losses, Trump’s sputtering attacks on Hunter Biden, his attempt to paint Joe and Kamala as Lenin and Luxembourg, his scaremongering over anarchists, antifa and various shades of Black Lives Matter are but like the buzzing of a mosquito in the midst of a savage deafening bombardment of the civilian population by those spiked lethal microbes.
I had dinner with a couple of friends in Portland the other night, a professional couple I have known for 30 years, and they lamented that ALL, and they meant ALL their friends were still wetting their beds worried that Trump would still pull off a victory.
Even a mere week before the election and with Trump’s numbers in the toilet, with him on stage every 10 minutes having descended into a raving lunatic, most Democrats were still too afraid to admit they are winning, possibly even preparing a landslide.
Being anxious over election outcomes is part of life, a pleasure I would not deny anybody. But when educated lawyers, doctors, and teachers simply say “this is 2016 all over again” and “who can believe the polls” well then you know you are dealing with a cleaned up a version of MAGAite who eschews all science, logic, expertise, and data.
Well, all the data, expertise, logic and science indicate that Trump is gonna get his ass kicked next week. That’s why The Economist now projects Trump’s chance of winning the electoral college at FOUR PERCENT. I’m sure that too is not reassuring enough for some veteran bedwetters. They best get themselves some rubber suits to get through the vote counting period.
Yes, Trump is creating the impression of hyper-activity in these closing days doing multiple rallies per day but really the fire has gone out. This week he spent most of the time at those rallies in the Great Flyover freezing his ass off and saying out loud how much he hated being wherever he was. He has NO message to repeat, no chants to be shouted, no program to be announced. His campaign appearances are like a grotesque version of the great Lenny Bruce’s final performances where he did little to no comedy but rather filled his 90 minutes with detailed complaints about how he was being treated by the cops and the local anti-smut busybodies.
The truth is, after so much Sturm and und Drang of the last years, the Trump administration is going out with a whimper and not much of a bang. Trump’s frantic flying back and forth to campaign hot spots is but thee careening around of a mentally inert bowling ball on the deck of a storm-tossed boat. Other than ratcheting up the local COVID infection rate, Trump’s rallies of unmasked monkeys add up to nothing politically, except for a haunting reminder of the final hours of Jonestown.
Just hope that on election night, if you find yourself at something originally billed as a Trump Victory Party, I’d be very careful not to hit the punch bowl after the 9 pm returns come in.
None of this is to say just vote and go home and all will be fine. We know better than that. We will have plenty of time to talk about what to do with the Democrats in power but first let’s touch on how they will get there.
It’s a cliché by now but it’s true. It is simply shocking to see how normalized it has become to watch to what ends the Trump Republican Party (and that’s what is and will be for years to come) will go to suppress Democratic votes. It’s one thing to dress up this suppression in the bullshit language of Voter ID and fraud prevention, it’s quite another to reach the point we have gotten to this week with the Republicans and the White House making manifold legal threats to NOT COUNT VOTES LEGALLY CAST.
How do we tolerate this? How do we go to bed at night and get up the next morning as if nothing happened when Republicans ask the court to disallow counting of ballots mailed in time but delivered late to the election office, thanks to the open sabotage of the USPS by the Trump Crime Family?
One thing is very clear for the immediate future. The election itself is over. Forget about it, once you have voted and once you have put in your time this weekend phone or text banking into swing states. Better to start preparing – not just fucking worrying—about what we might face during the 79 days between Trump’s defeat and Biden’s inauguration.
These are potentially the most volatile and perilous 11 weeks we have faced since the immediate aftermath of 9/11. It’s unknowable just how much disruption, damage and chaos Trump will try to incite to avoid eviction from the white House. There are dozens of speculative scenarios and I, for one, have no idea which if any is most plausible.
One rare opportunity before us is that Trump, being the coward, he is, will somehow put on a good face and just slink away to Trump TV once he’s knows he has really lost. He is going to have to a hard time finding institutional support for overturning the election --- as he has alienated everybody including most of the shit-eating bench of Republican senators.
I doubt, though, he will take this high road.
I admit it has been a privilege and a luxury for me to sit here over the last year and hand out prescriptions for whatever I think people should do. They don’t do it anyway. And I hardly pretend to be the first or last word on what one should do in any case.
I am forced to concede, however, that in my esteemed opinion Democrats, liberals and progressives are NOT really prepared to fight for the election once its over. They did not fight very well when Trump was governing under a semblance of rule of law. How the hell are they gonna do when Trump rips up the constitution?
I do fully recognize the rather heroic work put in over the last years by nameless local organizers and activists who have spun a fine web of infrastructure in their communities and in connection with others. But we need the big guns for what is coming. We need strong national and visionary leadership. We need troops who are confident and determined, and not dragging their piss-soaked pants on the ground. I have no recipes. I do have my networks. I hope you have yours. And I hope you are ready to act. Quickly.
Five days from now we either take the first step toward restoring and broadening democratic rule in this country or we hurl ourselves into a dark abyss from which there is no return. And in the weeks following that vote, we must be ready to defend it by any means necessary and not let ourselves be misled by politicians who get their salaries and perks in or out of the majority. It all depend on us, just us, only us. ++++
I'm no chicken. Here, on the record, are my conservative predictions for the final tallies in the election. If I'm wrong, sue me.
Popular Vote: Biden 52.5 Trump 45.5 Third Parties etc 2.5
Electoral College: Biden 342. Trump 196
Senate: Democrats 53 Repubs 47
House: Dems pick up 14 more seats
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