Coop Scoop: Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead Edition

The Coop Scoop: The Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead Edition

November 7, 2020
Issue #46

Let me give you a dozen solid reasons why you should be ecstatic this weekend:

No more William Barr. No More Stephen Miller. No more Rudy Giuliani. No more Betsy DeVos. No more Mike Pompeo. No more Mike Pence. No more Jared. No More Ivanka. No more Don Jr. No more Eric. Ciao Ciao Melania. And no more President Donald John Trump. After they are done ransacking the White House silver, and stuffing the towels into their suitcases, they will quickly fade into dark and haunting memories, ghosts with which to populate horror stories to scare little kids around a campfire.

Like a massive, oozing blackhead, the Trump Crime Family and its Associates have finally been squeezed out of the American body politic, at least at the level of government command and control. There’s something really satisfying in watching all that crud come to the surface and getting popped out.

Curious, to say the least, how many Trump opponents have reacted to this week’s rather momentous event of short-circuiting and dislodging an incumbent president who seemed hell bent on dismantling rule of law.

The level of entitlement of some sectors of the American electorate are truly gob smacking. They spent four years spinning their wheels (and waxing their weenies), all agitated over Donald Trump. But no matter how many times they stamped their feet, no matter how many fb memes they posted, Trump just wouldn’t go away.

Eventually, Trump kept on beating himself and then KO’ed himself with his Mass Death COVID strategy. And he lost. Let’s be honest: Democrats and Joe Biden in particular had very little to do with the president’s downfall. That’s OK.

Yet, as soon as the returns started coming in, there was massive despair as it became clear the Democrats would not take the Senate and that Biden’s win would be something quite short of a landslide.

All of a sudden these Democrats were both enraged and depressed. I mean, Political Room Service was asked to bring in a new President and a new Senate but they left that last dish in the kitchen. I’m going to give the American political system a bad review on TripAdvisor.

That was a pretty fast transition for the Democrats. One day it is, “Oh Trump can never be defeated, He will never leave. We’re forever fucked.” To the next day saying, “Yeah, we only got rid of Trump. All that other stuff promised to us by the pollsters failed to show up. What a rip off.”

People certainly have a right to be disappointed by Tuesday’s incomplete victory. But how about taking on some responsibility for ourselves and concluding that WE, not the pollsters, have to do better and more work, and that nothing in politics is given; it must be taken. Biden with a Senate would be a whole lot better than one without. That means we are going to have win it in 2022. In the meantime, we have removed the threat of a second Trump administration.

Meanwhile, Trump’s legal “strategy” seems to be failing at warp speed. The myriad lawsuits brought by his minions have failed to gain any traction in the upper or lower courts and seem destined to fail.

As I write this on Saturday afternoon, Trump remains in limbo, having nether conceded nor announced his next step. I admit to a certain fascination with his current dilemma. The more humiliation and embarrassment, the better. And I literally cannot wait to see just what hare-brained move Trump makes in this dance of death. It’s pretty good theater and there is part of us that will probably miss Trump once he’s gone.

The fizzle – at least so far—of Trump’s post-election gambit owes in great part to another one of his public fuck-ups. His appearance at 2:38 A.M. on election night, clearly shaken and befuddled, his lunatical allegations that he “had won” several states that he had not, plus his assertion that he had in fact won the election and now was being cheated out of it by the late arriving votes, his undermining of the election process itself, was Trump with no filter, at his most raw, at his most despicable, at his most disgusting and deplorable, a massive, hollow shell of resentment and insecurity, mendacity and meanness. Truly, the lowest of the low.

This little performance took the wind out of his Republican colleagues who were immediately struck with nightmares about having to defend such scabrous statements from the president. They literally ran for cover while a half dozen or so meekly tweaked the President (in the most gentle of terms).

Now to the Deeper Meaning part about the election. It was not the repudiation of Donald Trump or of Trumpism. He got more votes than before. Indeed, he got more votes than any other presidential candidate in US history except for Joe Biden who got 4 million more.

We have to come to terms with what we are seeing before us. Five years of Trump has created not just a group of followers, but rather a robust social movement that has plenty of life in it.

Until further notice, the Republican Party is now a fully owned subsidiary of the Trump Organization and while it will be thrown into a certain crisis by the defeat of the boss, it is not going away. With Trump’s popularity among Republican voters still so high, there will still be great fear in any or many GOP electeds taking him on publicly.

The party, therefore, will become a more “hardened” outfit, catering much more to the assholes in camo rather than the more traditional assholes in Brooks Brothers.

The alt-right might very well thrive under a Biden administration, nothing better than an enemy in power (!), and VP Kamala Harris, as a black woman from San Francisco, will be positioned as the Stalinist Socialist Hatchet Lady ready to take your guns and lock you up in a FEMA facility underneath a Wal-Mart.

So, in any political calculation we make for the near and mid-term future, we will have to factor in a thriving white nationalist movement with Trump as their leader (there are rumors he’s developing a reality TV show where he will serve as a shadow president, critiquing the Biden administration on a daily basis).

The 35% of the population that zealously supports Trump turns out to be more like 45% or more. And I believe they constitute an inflection point in our history. For all of the 20th Century and the first 20 years of this one, there has always been a hard-right faction lurking on the sidelines.

Now that Trump has watered, groomed and pruned them for the last 4 years, this hard-right has gone though a substantive change. They are no longer the two-dimensional aging John Birchers who were basically ultra-patriots with bigoted views.

Dear Reader: It was exactly a year ago that I announced the coming creation of the Coop Scoop and it strated up a handful of weeks later.

It's crucial we continue to grow the Coop Scoop as we enter the most perilous and dramatic period in recent American history. Even if Trump is defeated, Trumpism isn't going away anytime soon. And an incoming Democratic administration will have to fight tooth and nail to get things done.

And we the people will have to fight even harder as we know that real change always comes from the bottom and we must hold ALL politicians accountable.

So, yes, we need solid and increased financial support. We have been getting a constant moderate stream of support and we now have about 750 readers. We need to double and then triple that. I know that of lot you have chipped in $5, $10 or $25 to many political campaigns. Now we need everybody reading this to to do the same for the Coop Scoop.

In the coming hurly-burly of the next few months we are not going to have much time for fundraising. So how about getting through that NOW, today, this week?

Consider this note, then, not a reminder but rather a forceful appeal for your economic support.

We have two different platforms you can use.

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I am setting an ambitious goal of $5000.00 over the next two weeks. And I know we can do it. So please dig deep and help out.

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After the election, we are moving Coop Scoop to a new platform with many more features. There will still be a shorter, free version of Coop Scoop still available but you will need to be a donor/subscriber to get the full experience which will include some video AMA's, perhaps some podcasts and full uncut editions of the newsletter among other perks.

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This new Trumpism is more akin to an embryonic “fighting force,” a high energy, club-like association appealing primarily but not exclusively to white men. The Trumpies also see themselves as revolutionaries or insurgents or baddass outlaws out to challenge the conventions and sensibilities of a society they believe scorns them. That’s why they don’t care if Trump produces anything for them. It’s enough that he takes a running kick in the balls of liberals.

A related takeaway from the election is that Democrats better face the face music and understand they are in as much trouble as the Republicans. The Democrats learned little from 2016 and once again have run a campaign and are fortifying a party that really has very very little to say to workers of any color.

The party apparatus is much more comfortable sipping Chablis with hi-tech and movie moguls and really sees hardscrabble areas like the industrial Midwest as little more than a place with some legacy union votes and lots of African-American voters in the cities.

If the Democrats continue their current trajectory of pandering to the professional managerial class and the creative class while continuing to ignore blue collar workers, then those who voted for Trump this time will be left to rot and marinate in resentment and will provide more fuel for the hard-right in the months and years to come.

And this does bring us back to the Senate. Yes, not having it and, worse, letting Mitch McConnell have it, is nothing but bad news. Any fantasy that Biden could be pushed into being a transformational president – by moving toward Medicare for All, the Green New Deal etc—now collapses under its own weight. For now, Biden is off the hook because McConnell is squarely blocking his way.

McConnell is already threatening to block Biden’s cabinet’s appointments by allowing the Senate to confirm candidates only acceptable to the Republican minority.

Any significant legislative action taken by Biden would not only have to survive the Republican Senate but also the Federal Judiciary and the Supreme Court. Not a bright outlook.

That’s it for now. We have plenty to think and write about in the days to come: the final unraveling of Trump, the attitude of the criminal courts toward him and his flunkies,, the outlines of the Biden administration, strategizing by the liberal left rank and file and so much more. +++