Corrected Copy: Coop Scoop --Do Americans Desire Dictatorship? Some 39% of Americans are Cool With It.

We're going to find out 8 short months from now

Note an uncorrected draft of this went out a few mins ago. Here’s the clean one!

February 8-9 2024

By Marc Cooper

The U.S. Supreme Court did today what we expected it to do. Or is preparing to do. In Thursday morn’s hearing  on the 14^th amendment case from Colorado trying to keep Donald Trump off the ballot the questioning from the justices made it abundantly clear they have zero intention of banning the Orange Jesus from running just because he incited a violent attack on the Capitol and plotted to deny the peaceful transfer of power.

P’shaw. A minor hiccup.

There are several truths competing in this case and at no point do they link up.

The third section of the 14^th Amendment clearly disqualifies Donald Trump from running for office. True.

Colorado made the right decision.  True.

If left to stand it could be incentive for red states to start banning candidates with the ease which they now use the filibuster and impeachment. True

This court is a strident defender of states’ rights and by that measure the ruling should be upheld. True.

Letting one judge in one state skew the entire election is a bad idea.  Anyway that’s Judge Cannon’s job, isn’t it?  True.

Simply put, Trump should not be on the ballot in 2024.  True. And the Supreme Court will make sure he is. True.

It would also be a lot better for all of is if Donald Trump was firmly defeated and voted off stage by the American people, not a court ruling. Not necessarily true.

But as I said last week, we chickens are all just sitting here, listening to a loudly clicking clock, and waiting, waiting, waiting and waiting for the Democrats to begin their campaign against him in a serious manner. Well, hurry up and wait some more.

I am now going to contradict everything I have written for the last couple of years and go back on an affirmation I made a few lines ago.  I am officially now NOT expecting a robust Democratic campaign to defeat Trump. Sorry, just not seeing it and it’s getting late.  Nor am I expecting some magical wave of citizen anger to wash over the country and a bring a million people into the streets last week like the Germans did to protest the rise of the extreme right. The fascist Right. Like MAGA. Nope, I am expecting the country to pretty much continue sleep walking into out next phase of history that begins exactly eight months from now.  And one year from now we might already be a couple of weeks into a Trump dictatorial regime.  That’s how close we are.

We watch the unbelievable incompetence and partisan narrow vision that now dominates the House and not a creature stirs.  Instead, newspapers and magazines fold at record pace as the public loses interest in even following politics.  I mean, who can even follow the absolute unbridled craziness that is now the US House Of Representatives whose Republican majority this week voted down a totally pro-Republican border package only because Trump and Friends would rather keep the border a festering issue rather than an issue solved by a bi partisan group under the Biden White House.  In other times and in other places this might have stirred several thousands peasants to take the field with their pitchforks.  What we got last week instead was mostly media riffing on Taylor Swift.

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All that said, here comes my big betrayal.  Making predictions in this atmosphere is absurd.  But I have come around to believing that Joe Biden’s best chance of winning in November is only if Jack Smith defeats Donald Trump in federal court before election day.  And with the circuit court fully rejecting  Trump’s plea for lawless immunity and with any luck the Supremes following (in their own interest) that means Trump can be tried, convicted and sentenced for his role in January 6 before election day.  I never wanted to outsource Trump’s defeat to the courts but…hey… nobody ain’t doing anything else anyway.

As we wade into the general election three salient facts emerge.  Donald Trump is much weaker than his acolytes claim.  He would be knocked out by a conviction and …who knows?... he might even lose the old fashioned way, by losing the election.  Second, Joe Biden is also very weak. Much weaker than his supporters admit.  And, finally, there’s a much of a threat of a third party sabotaging the whole thing as there is not.

All of the back-patting of Biden winning 96% of the write in Democratic vote last week in South Carolina is missing a couple of asterisks.  He won 96% among the FOUR PERCENT of Democratic voters who turned out, compared with 12, 16 and even 20% during primaries in the last two decades.  Turn out numbers like that are the nightmares of campaign consultants and frankly it does not bode well.

Pro-Trump economists have begun to admit that the Biden economy is very much afloat and that we are not living in some dystopian nightmare of penury (though Comrade Marianne Williamson uses the same economic rhetoric as the Trumpers).  So now we are back on to “invasions” by bloodthirsty fentanyl tweakers, groomers, rapists and killers pouring across the southern Border.  Democrats had a good laugh, as well they should have, when the Republicans killed the border measure that Biden supported and  would have signed.  They should have a double laugh and wipe off the flop sweat too. Because what the Democrats didn’t say is that the border bill when signed by Biden would have rolled back border policy some 25 years, putting in place some of the most inhumane and restrictive measures in recent history.  It was a right wing xenophobic bill that the Republicans hammered out with their Democratic Senate colleagues.  And while Biden may have lucked out in not having to sign this contraption, this does mean that Democratic border rhetoric this election year is going to closely resemble the rantings of the Trump nativists and racists.

That could take another 5 or 10 favorability points from Biden’s already miserable 39% rating. Add that to the losses among youth voters over the war and you better get ready for Trump starting to measure the Oval Office drapes.  And while we are on polls, that same survey showed that 68% of Americans think the economy “is getting worse” when, actually, it has been getting better. It is even “good” if you look at only the macro-economic indicators. Meanwhile, 74% of Republicans say it would be just fine if Trump assumed the role of dictator for a day. And it’s 39% of all Americans who are cool with the dictator idea.

We like to think of civilians living under dictatorships as victims. They generally are, especially after the first few initial spasms of nationalism and chauvinism wear thin and the inevitable corruption, repression and megalomania of the Dictator Himself set it.  Excuse the term, but my “lived experience” abroad tells me something differently.  Dictatorships always become unpopular and unstable.  But in their initial stages, like it or not, accept or not, there usually is a large portion if not an active majority of the country who was calling for and  who enthusiastically support the new authoritarian regime.  We are going to find out real soon if that can or cannot happen here. +++

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