Fasten Your Seatbelts, It’s Going to be a Bumpy Month!

I can’t believe we’re finally counting down the last month of the Trump misadministration! And everyone is wondering what more corrupt, crazy and/or destructive actions the loser-in-chief will unleash before he is at long last out the door. It has long been clear that Trump never intends to acknowledge his loss or concede, and he continues to leverage his doomed and sometimes farcical legal and legislative attempts to overturn the election results to milk vast sums of money from his gullible cult base. Although ostensibly to support his ever-imminently successful challenges, the vast majority of the so far over $200 million in contributions is being funneled into his leadership PAC slush fund, with very lax restrictions on how he can use it. Accordingly, he will keep up the legal challenges as long as he possibly can to extract the maximum amount of funds from his minions.

In addition to being pathetically unable to cope with the reality that he lost, Trump is obviously concerned about his legal exposure once out of office, and is therefore all the more dangerous as far as what actions he may consider to try to hold onto power. Although extremely disturbing, his reported discussion of imposing martial law and forcing a redo of the elections in the swing states he lost, as proposed by his disgraced former national security advisor Michael Flynn, is so unconstitutional and outlandish (albeit terrifying) as to be pretty safely outside the realm of possibility. One can only hope that if he actually gave the order for that, one of his generals would not only refuse but put a bullet through his head! There is certain to be an attempt by numerous House and probably one or more Senate Republicans to contest the electoral college results in the January 6 joint meeting of Congress, which may lead to quite a spectacle, but those attempts are also doomed to fail, although will certainly add another level of shame to our electoral history.

We are also awaiting a large number of corrupt presidential pardons which will almost certainly include all of Trump’s convicted cronies as well as preemptive blanket pardons for his family members, business associates and possibly even himself. The catch for his family members and others who have not been indicted is that accepting such a pardon is a tacit admission of criminal activity, and of course is only applicable to federal crimes. That also theoretically removes their ability to claim the fifth amendment in subsequent investigations. Thus, there may well be some hesitancy in proceeding with these.

Meanwhile, Trump is predictably totally ignoring the raging and worsening pandemic and its economic consequences, except for touting “his” vaccine results. He is also downplaying and deflecting the massive cyberattack apparently from Russian state actors on numerous government agencies and private companies, predictably providing cover for his idol Putin.

Although it is very likely that Trump will attempt to sabotage Biden’s administration in any way he can think of, such as his recent actions in hollowing out the Pentagon and installing his own cronies on advisory boards (who can be replaced after he leaves), it is hard to imagine that he would do anything as outrageous as a preemptive military strike on a country such as Iran, which could precipitate a war for which he would get the full blame.

I think everyone is anxiously waiting to see what happens to the Republican party once Trump is out of power and loses his bully pulpit. He will almost certainly remain the dominant force in the GOP, with a huge war chest, and will probably attempt to function as a government in exile, cheated out of his rightful second term, in the alternative universe of right wing media, either creating his own media brand or using existing ones. As long as he can effectively deliver election results for Republicans (which he did in November except for his own campaign), most elected Republicans will be too cowardly to say or do anything to cross him. I was previously under the mistaken impression that if Trump becomes a convicted felon, he cannot run again in 2024, and I am sure most of his base would not care about that at all, though I can’t imagine him running a campaign from inside a prison cell! Don Junior and maybe Ivanka may also try to further hijack the party whether or not Trump tries to run again, but I think that either of them getting themselves elected would be an uphill battle. One can only hope that there will be an inevitable and destructive battle within the Republican Party which will leave it splintered and weakened.

The January 5 senate runoff elections in Georgia are absolutely critical to win if there is going to be any chance of Biden accomplishing anything substantial in his first two years. Both races seem to be statistically tied, which based on November’s results probably means that the Democrats are really at least 5 points behind, and it will all come down to turnout. Winning both seats is not impossible but unfortunately very improbable!

The other thing we are anxiously waiting to see, which will take some time to determine, is whether and to what extent our society and government can recover from the highly divisive, corrosive and destructive effects of the last four years, with Trump having relentlessly taken a jackhammer to all of the major pillars of our surprisingly fragile democracy! With a large minority of the country now existing on a different plane of reality from the rest of us, I am pretty pessimistic about a substantial recovery, and therefore also about the long-term future of our so-called democracy!