REALITY CHECK: EXPLAINING THE TRUMP COUP & GOP POLITICAL TERRORISM

This is an account of an actual event that is happening in the United States of America, today, as I write this – not Venezuela or Cuba or Russia or Iran or North Korea, or Germany in 1933. America. Now.


The Republican Attorney General of Texas Ken Paxton is seeking to sue four states to invalidate the 2020 election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin with hopes to challenge the will of the people in the Supreme Court and overthrow an election decisively won by president-elect Joe Biden over a month ago with the express aim to anoint Donald Trump king and ruler of an autocracy. Over one-hundred GOP congressmen are backing this blatant attack on democracy and Texas Senator Ted Cruz is volunteering to represent this bloodless coup to overthrow the government. All of this with no credible evidence there is any reason to pursue the “case,” over thirty court losses and the attorney general of the United States, a Trump bag man, announcing; “There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud.”

I have written about some crazy shit in this space over the past twenty-three years, but this takes the cake. None, absolutely none of what appears above is opinion or satire or hyperbole. This is news and fact, treasonous machinations that are being conducted with our tax dollars; a monkey trial, a circus act, a fucking abomination and overt political terrorist attack on the fundamental foundations of the republic. There is no other way to put it; this is a concerted effort to overturn a national election, essentially to satiate the insecurities of a megalomaniac, but also to quell the growing need for sore-loser zealots to have an excuse to why a wildly failed incumbent president, who did not win the popular vote in 2016, and NEVER had positive approval ratings, lost the election by over seven-million votes, thus denied another four years to further eviscerate the fragile center of this nation.

For the past week, the president of these United States, not a game show host or real estate baron or celebrity playboy freak, called on lawmakers and attorneys’ generals of sovereign states to ignore the vote and appoint electors to make him king. This is something real, not imagined, like Q-Anon or the Proud Boys, Communist Black Lives Matter or ballots in garbage cans. Donald Trump, the forty-fifth president, is openly conducting a coup d’état and then tweeting about it. It’s all in the open. This is something his buddy, Vladimir Putin does routinely. This is right out of a fascist playbook. I first read it in Mein Kamf, and now it is happening. Here. In America.   

Of course, this was expected. Trump told us he would do this. “If I don’t win, then it was rigged” was baked into two campaigns, 2016 and this one. Trump was shocked he pulled a fluke the first time. This year it was a higher hill to climb. He sucked at being president and he was about to go down. He set this up to ameliorate the devastation to his paper-thin ego. Plus, as much as he hates losing, Trump loves litigation, or at least the show-boating of litigation to provide an alternative optic that something went wrong when it doesn’t go his way. Shit, he ran for president because NBC was fucking with his contract. This charade is the summation of his abysmal business career. 

Moreover, Trump is in big trouble in the Southern District of New York and other places, and his family, too. There are a ton of ongoing criminal investigations into his business and personal affairs, lawsuits and financial ruin coming his way. He is in deep debt to foreign banks and corrupt governments and he is a pariah in the liberal, urban, Hollywood circles he craves to be accepted in, before he put on his phony populist right-wing religious act. He has burned bridges and committed many crimes and if I were him I would try and overthrow the government to maintain the protections of the office to keep my ass out of jail and bankruptcy. Why do you think he floats pardoning his family, his lawyer, himself? He is guilty and a loser. His motivation to continue his attack on America, which he has perpetuated for four years, makes absolute perfect sense.

The Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, that has represented the conservative will of the electorate since the mid-nineteenth century, is another matter entirely. It has lowered itself into the quagmire here, because there is little chance it can survive without Donald Trump’s base. There are not enough votes to win anymore without kowtowing to the racist, ill-informed, knuckle-dragging element of the party given voice these past four years. So, they go along with this insurrection. Makes sense for right-wing rodeo clowns on the radio and TV too. Conspiracy theories, faux outrage and mob rules make good ratings. Why not illegitimate the incoming Biden Administration before it comes to power? But they are civilians, and they have every right to line their pockets with advertising money to tear down America. But a political party backing this treasonous bullshit is a lasting scar on our checkered history.

And what about this lawsuit: a desperate eleventh-hour sham before the votes are set in stone on Monday, January 14, 2020, officially and quite legally making Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. the forty-sixth president of the United States, as willed by the American electorate? The lead legal mouthpiece on this farce is just another bleating gremlin like Rudy Giuliani, a man with arm’s length crimes soon to be revealed and in need of a nifty pardon from Donald Trump, who is doling them out to all his criminal friends. Paxton has been under indictment since 2015 on securities fraud charges relating to activities prior to taking office, and just this past October many high-level officials in Paxton’s office made allegations accusing him of “bribery, abuse of office and other crimes.” He knows who is president, and he knows that president likes a show to wallpaper over his failures, so he is giving him one in hopes of getting one of those get-out-of-jail-free cards. 

For all intent and purposes, Paxton, Trump, Cruz, over one-hundred Republican congressman, and a host of song-and-dance imbeciles in the bowels of our airwaves are saying; Fuck America. Fuck the vote. Fuck the law. Fuck the founders and the flag and the military that provides the freedoms of vote through sacrifice. Fuck the solemn institutions of the republic. We need succor. We choose profit. We crave power. Mostly, Fuck the voters and for good measure Fuck you.

Sure, it is abject folly and it will not work, but attempted robbery and attempted murder and an attempted coup d’état are still considered crimes.

This is a crime. Republicans who back it are complicit in this crime. For the record, there are many who are not, proving its dangerous anomaly. Donald Trump, the most criminally active of all our presidents, however, is making this his final act.

This is happening. Right now. Not in Venezuela or Cuba or Russia or Iran or North Korea, or Germany in 1933. In America. 2020.