Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Wednesday, January 20, 2021

Maybe, Just Maybe

 Trump does nothing if not dominate the conversation. Even as Joe Biden does typically normal Joe Biden-y things, Trump continues to be the object of fascination: the car wreck of American presidencies.

However, I do wonder if maybe he just disappears. Some of this will depend on efforts to keep him off social media. Since Twitter and other platforms shut him up, he's basically been neutered. While plenty of people were worried about today, nothing happened. Evidence suggests that the lack of Trump directing his jihadists played into this. 

Trump's source of power was power itself. Because might meant more than right, Trump's literal presence in the Oval Office was the source of his power more than any idea. Sure, there are those committed to Trump's person and those committed to white nationalism. It's not a single overlapping circle, but it's close. As Trump loses the trapping of power, he just becomes the sad old man eating hamburdlars and yelling at the Tee Vee that in many ways he always was. 

Trump was an aspiring caudillo, an emergent Mugabe, but for white people. He can't be that person without the trappings of power. Especially as the law closes in, he will struggle to maintain the ludicrous veneer of masculine power that somehow people hung on him. The reason Trump did well with certain segment of non-white, make voters is this projection of power. Not just incumbency, but wedded to incumbency. That's all gone now.

I'm not saying it's the most likely outcome, but there is about a 33% chance he simply fades away, popping up in the news with a new indictment or a new lawsuit. 

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