The Coop Scoop: The What About Those 74 Million Trump Voters Edition

If you believe all are beyond redemption, you lose.

#53 December 22, 2020

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Down to this week’s state of play, the lowlights of one more Hell Week.

For the last four years it would have been impossible to do anything, no matter what one’s politics, to not obsess over Donald Trump.

Even as he is only a month away from eviction from the White House, we are still obsessed with him and rightly so. As he loses his grip on power by and by, he is also very clearly losing his grasp on reality.

No serious person can deny that he is out of his mind.  Trump is, indeed, a grifter and a BSer and that makes it harder to figure out what he really believes.

At this juncture I think we can assume two items that are core to his twisted state of mind.  He has found a unique way to raise a veritable fortune from the poor suckers he has bamboozled into the Stop the Steal show.

Second, I am convinced that there is a part of him that deep down also believes he was cheated, tripped up by the Deep State and that he legitimately won and was robbed. Consequently, the next month remains uncertain, unpredictable and dangerous.

For an excellent run down on Trump’s faltering grip on reality, check out this fine piece in The Atlantic from Peter Wehner.

Wehner, a Republican, stands especially alarmed by the reports that convicted and pardoned felon, Mike Flynn, has been boosting the idea of imposing martial law (!) to “rerun” the election in states that Trump lost.  And Trump was apparently listening with interest to Flynn’s proposal for military rule. Not gonna happen as the Pentagon has no interest in fronting for a losing and crazy President who has 29 days left in office.

That Trump, however, was even considering or listening to this idea from his former disgraced National Security Advisor is in itself chilling.

Mix in what was apparently Trump’s proposal that crackpot lawyer and conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell be appointed as DOJ Special Counsel to investigate Hunter Biden and you have a visibly insane President who should be forced from office this very moment.

“I’ve been covering Donald Trump for a while,” Jonathan Swan of Axios tweeted. “I can’t recall hearing more intense concern from senior officials who are actually Trump people. The Sidney Powell/Michael Flynn ideas are finding an enthusiastic audience at the top.”

Yeah, well, “intense concerns” from most Republicans has been as worthless as a set of a Trump branded neckties.  They are not going to do anything about this, other than express this public whimpering, and then continue their near-worship of Trump, at least in the short run..

So as Wehner asserts:

“Even amid the chaos, it’s worth taking a step back to think about where we are: An American president, unwilling to concede his defeat by 7 million popular votes and 74 Electoral College votes, is still trying to steal the election. It has become his obsession.

“In the process, Trump has in too many cases turned his party into an instrument of illiberalism and nihilism. Here are just a couple of data points to underscore that claim: 18 attorneys general and more than half the Republicans in the House supported a seditious abuse of the judicial process.”

“And it’s not only, or even mainly, elected officials. The Republican Party’s base has often followed Trump into the twilight zone, with a sizable majority of them affirming that Joe Biden won the election based on fraud and many of them turning against medical science in the face of a surging pandemic.”

With that pandemic raging and one American a minute perishing, Trump has totally checked out – even from the scant and incompetent engagement he had earlier in the year. He simply does not care.

The Biden transition team found, to their shock, that the Trump administration, had “no plan” for vaccine distribution beyond the middle of January. And now we see that even that inadequate effort has been bungled.

A few days ago, Pfizer announced that it had “millions” of vaccines sitting in their warehouse earmarked for the U.S. but the company could not find anyone in Washington DC to indicate to them where or how to ship them.  You can’t make this stuff up!

Most states are saying they are only getting about 40% or less of what they expected in the first shipment, thereby severely hampering their planned timetables and adding to the death count now running at about one hundred thousand per month. This might be one area, one of the few areas,  where I have some real confidence that the Biden administration will immediately intervene in and improve. It’s pretty hard to do worse than Trump.

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Meantime, nobody and I mean nobody can figure out what’s going on with Trump replacing almost the entirety of the Pentagon leadership in the last few weeks, filling the vacancies with loyalist cronies.  If he’s a planning a coup, he is crazier than I think. But a Splendid Little War with, say, Iran to completely bollox up the incoming administration? Somewhat unlikely but not at all impossible.

The wholesale reshuffle of the Pentagon brass, elevating and naming a bunch of undistinguished, unqualified, Trumpsters to these high-ranking posts might just be an anti-climactic game.  Maybe Trump thinks he is scaring us (he is). Maybe he just wanted to thumb his nose at this five-sided symbol of what he considers his rivals in the “deep state.” Maybe he just wants to let some of his cronies bask in what will be their short-lived glory.  Maybe it was just part of the current strategy of hindering the flow of info from the Pentagon to the Biden transition team. Or maybe it is something more sinister.

“Trump has figuratively decapitated our operational civilian leadership in the Pentagon,” James Stavridis, a retired admiral and supreme allied commander of NATO, told The New York Times. “Jubilant high-fives are the order of the day in Beijing, Moscow, Tehran and Pyongyang.”

The retired admiral added: “I worry about a North Korean or Iranian miscalculation, thinking the U.S. is too distracted to respond appropriately to a fresh tanker seizure in the Arabian Gulf or a new long-range ballistic missile test — something either might do to gain leverage in negotiations with the incoming administration. Similarly, China could move even more aggressively on Hong Kong or even worse Taiwan, while Russia might be tempted to launch a significant cyberattack.”

Oh, wait! Quite a prescient statement from the retired admiral made five weeks ago. Lo and behold here we are in the midst of what is probably the greatest Russian hack in recent history. Something we find out, from Microsoft, not from the US government, that has been going on since March.  As Russian intelligence operatives tapped into some 18,000 or more U.S. based agencies, departments and companies, including the part of the Department of Energy that oversees our nuclear arsenal, Trump was too busy playing golf, denying the lethality of COVID, and tweeting several dozen times a day about his personal resentments to as much as notice.

It’s staggering that we should be in this fix. A consensus among intelligence analysts and members of congress who have been privately briefed agree this treacherous breach is the handiwork of the overseas-oriented SVU branch of Russian spookdom. 

Trump still denies the Russians had anything to do with this and, instead, tries to pin it on China as part of his ongoing campaign to satanize Beijing while kissing Putin’s rear end.

"The attack unfortunately represents a broad and successful espionage-based assault on both the confidential information of the U.S. government and the tech tools used by firms to protect them," Microsoft's President Brad Smith wrote.

"While governments have spied on each other for centuries, the recent attackers used a technique that has put at risk the technology supply chain for the broader economy," he added.

Oddly enough, there are too many on the left side of the spectrum who brush all this off, not speak of right wing Trumpsters who have a new-found love for Russia.

The U.S., some on the left assert, is guilty of just such interventions and spying for decades and that those sounding the alarm on the Russians just want to provoke a new cold war… while those on the right say it is all to discredit Trump. Both Right and Left Russia deniers have one thing in common: they are convinced this is some sort of hoax hyped up by our own intelligence agencies (to what end?).

The left is correct on the first count. The U.S. is hardly sin-free on this score.  But principled people should apply those principles equally to all.  If you are upset about U.S. spying and interventions as you should be, that is NOT justification to be an ostrich about what the Russians are up to. Further, the Russian are hardly intervening in order to clean things up in American foreign policy.

Not by a longshot.  The Soviet Union, once the home of the Communist International, has now become Russia, the home of a what is essentially a Neo-Fascist International.  

The Russians are the primary promoters of almost all far right political organizations throughout Europe and are an actively disruptive force. Every major alt-right formation in Western and Eastern Europe gets solid backing by Putin and his gang of kleptocrats.

Isn’t this just a fair defensive reaction to the aggressive expansion of NATO on Russia’s western borders?  No doubt that has to be a partial motivation for this Russian hubris. It cannot serve, however, as some sort of justification or rationalization for Putin’s policies.  Putin is an evil and repressive autocrat who doesn’t blink an eye when poisoning his rivals. And that is the sort of autocratic rule he is trying to promote throughout Europe as he actively subverts democratic rule.

Mr. Putin did not really have to do much of anything to keep the US paralyzed and mostly out of this geopolitical gamesmanship. No, Trump did that all on his own.

Those who argue that Trump is somehow compromised or “owned” or “run” by the Russians are far off the mark.  The Mueller report made it clear that while the Trump campaign and administration gleefully co-operated with the Russians, it could not find any active conspiracy. And I think the Russians are too wily to invest much confidence in an incompetent stumblebum and washed up reality show host.

We also know from Mueller’s top prosecutor, Andrew Weissman, that Mueller did not conduct any real investigation into Trump’s financial life even if several investigative reporters have amply documented a long history of intensive and complicated financial links between him and Moscow.

Don’t buy the conspiracy theory that Trump is a straight-up Russian operative. Truth is, he’s a doltish and voluntary Russian ally. He loves and admires Putin who he no doubt sees as a role model (with the exception that Vlad is about 10 times smarter and more clever that Donald).  He wants to pander to Putin, as he has done for a decade, with his eyes fixed on a vast Russian market that just might want to buy some of his branded tchotchkes and patronize the Trump Tower Moscow that he has longed to erect.

I am also among those who oppose a new cold war. As if the only two alternatives here are Cold War Two or Stick Your Head in the Sand. Any solution, any amelioration of the currently horrid US-Russian conflict does not reside in U.S. military action nor in necessarily squeezing Russia any tighter with more sanctions.  What’s needed now is a mature, level-headed American leadership who can let Russia know this kind of stuff will not be tolerated but at the same time at least tries to seek some sort of grand diplomatic accord to a crisis that has flared into dangerous territory since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. This is just one more volatile hand-me down bungle from Trump who seems intent on booby trapping and stymying the incoming Biden White House in every manner possible.

Do not take this Russian cyber incursion lightly. Whatever you think of US foreign policy, do you really want the Russians tapping into our military, industrial and nuclear networks?

This will be a very difficult challenge for Biden as his foreign policy team are basically the same folks who believed 20 years ago that expanding NATO and spooking Russia was the best thing since sliced pumpernickel. We can only hope against hope that some of this team have matured and can soberly find some way to start de-escalating this crisis in a very different world than that of 1990 or even 2000.

This week is also the week, that we see the beginning of what will become The Great Trump Fade. Understand me, I am not saying that Trump and Trumpism are about to disappear.  Though, as Trump gives up the most powerful post in the world and as he has besmirched himself so sordidly since losing the election, he is inevitably going to continue to lose influence.

The flippant remark from so many liberals that “he still has 74 million supporters” is precisely…flippant.  Trump had 74 million voters, true enough. He also had more than 70% of polled Republicans agreeing in polls that he was really the election winner. (So all of a sudden people take polls so seriously?).

Let’s unpack this a bit.  We live in a profoundly apolitical and I would argue politicly underdeveloped society, at least when compared to other great industrial democracies.  For the most part, Americans don’t care much about politics and tens of millions possess political knowledge that would barely fill a wine glass.

The only saving grace here is that most Americans are not very ideological and cannot really explain in rational terms the fundamental or nuanced differences among conservatives, liberals, neo-liberals, paleo-conservatives, socialists or libertarians.  They may THINK they now but they do not.

I conclude from this, that among those 74 million Trump voters, there are probably a dozen subgroups. There are racists. There are xenophobes. There are Fox or Newsmax zombies.  But there are also people who voted for him because their family has always voted Republican. And others who just didn’t like Hillary for the right or wrong reasons.  Others, especially white working-class voters, who voted for Obama twice, didn’t really see their lives improve, and thought that Trump might do a better job. Other culturally conservative but economically liberal mid-westerners might have been put off  by the Democrats’ uncritical embrace of WOKENESS which is a much bigger hit in Brooklyn than it is in Boise.

Lumping them all together as 74 million deplorables with blood in their teeth ready to kill and die for Donald amounts to a radical and superficial miscalculation.

Don’t ask me for any hard evidence as it is the sort hard to produce so soon over the election, but I am going to take an educated guess and figure that the hard-core, whack job, die-hards for Donald Trump are probably less than half of that 74 million cohort. That’s still a helluva lot of people who are bonkers. But an equal or greater number that are not crazy as much as they are confused or disengaged, or demoalized, or hopeless.

There will be a noticeable drop off in Trump’s influence among these other, not-so ideological Trump voters. If you want to see what fading looks like we can start with William Barr who, even as a war criminal, hit his limit in toadying to a crazed Trump. As he leaves office Wednesday, he flatly refused Trump’s notion of appointing a Special Counsel to investigate Hunter Biden. No plaudits, please. But this small break is a symbolic one.  Just as the Republican Senate has defied Trump’s veto threat on the military spending bill (Trump opposed a portion of the bill that would force renaming of military bases with Confederate monikers!).

These do not qualify as seismic shifts but rather just a series of small foreshocks. People, all kinds of people, including a lot of those Trump voters as opposed to passionate supporters, are frankly exhausted and maybe chagrined by the ear-splitting cacophony of Trumpworld, chock-a-block with daily crises, alarming tweets, incessant chest beating, betrayed promises, mass death, a crashed economy, and the constant lying and obfuscation.

Democrats (I’m talking about grass roots Dems not their geriatric leadership), will have no future unless they begin to reach out and at least talk to and search for political common ground with some of these 74 million. In bald, bare political terms, some of them ripe for picking. OTOH, if you let them rot on the vine, they are going to become toxic. That’s how we got Trump in the first place.

The Democratic Party has done an excellent job in ignoring these folks for the last 40 years and for that we have all reaped the whirlwind.  If Dems just give up on the “74 million” it is the Democrats who are doomed. Trump will fade as the invulnerable leader and half of his voters will become apathetic about him.  That other half, however, the 30 million or so crazies who have seceded from reality are going to be one big frickin’ headache in the years to come and we better prepare for that starting now.

And we can contain them, we can beat them, if and only Democrats, liberals, progressives and independents build an ever-broader social movement that reaches out not only to the young and the minorities on the left, but also to demoralized workers and rural folks who might have voted for Trump, or for nobody at all,

Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt, who formally joined the  Democratic Party  this week came up with a novel and rather sobering summary of the danger we face if that does not occur. Closely paraphrasing from one of his recent Battleground podcasts that he co-hosts with former Obama Senior Advisor and Campaign Manager David Plouffe he said:

The two parties are historically reversing their positions. Somehow the Republican Party has become the leading party of the working class, especially the white working class and of farmers and impoverished rural residents. The Democrats, meanwhile, are becoming the party of wealthier middle-class and better off urban professionals, tech workers, and Big Tech itself (while still holding on to Latino and Black support). Though even in those  minority categories, Trump made some inroads in the last election.

We remain at a perilous historic intersection. We either build robust and broad coalitions in defense of democracy and progressive social change, or we continue to slip and slide toward illiberalism and possibly autocracy.

Trump is but a bozo who has trouble tying his shoelaces.  But he has shown us that four years down the road a smarter, more suave and refined Trump could easily succeed where he failed.

It’s both destructive and self-defeating to keep telling ourselves the fairy tale that in spite of Trump’s attempts to subvert democracy, “the institutions held.”

They most certainly did not.

Among the supposedly three equal branches of government, the executive has dwarfed the other two. Congress was NOT able to exercise proper oversight of Trump. He was allowed to run rampant, to the extreme of ordering his crew to simply ignore congressional subpoenas. Robert Mueller valiantly tried but failed to hold the President accountable for his obvious obstructions of justice. And he flopped. As did the too-narrow and too late impeachment move by the excessively cautious Pelosi and the House Democrats.

Mueller fizzled, in part, thanks to some of Mueller’s own shortcomings, but also thanks to the blatant intervention and mendacity of Barr’s Justice Department. Mitch McConnell and his troop of self-serving and chicken-hearted Republican Senators effectively blocked any application of justice to Trump by voting in a block to oppose any and everything critical of the Great Leader. And to put a ribbon on this oversight farce, Trump has pardoned and will continue to pardon those flunkies who willfully obstructed justice to protect the Boss.

Yes, some district courts ruled against Trump and curbed some of his offenses. Concurrently, Trump named three militant reactionaries to the Supreme Court and more than 200 partisan conservatives to lifetime federal judgeships – nightmares we will be living with for another generation, or two.

The only thing that stopped Trump was the massive mobilization of American voters who whipped him. Along with a handful of very courageous whistleblowers who had to go outside these supposedly hallowed “institutions” in order to shine a light on some real wrongdoing.

If we want those institutions to really hold, we the people must be the mainstays – not a corps of mythical neutral bureaucrats.

My Christmas wish: I wish we had Nuremberg Trial here in the U.S.

See you Wednesday at 5pm for our online AMA. Be there or be square. +++

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