THOUGHTS ON TRUMP'S SITUATION RIGHT NOW VIS A VIS HIS HOPES FOR OVERCOMING THE COUP

 

THIS POST IS BUILT FROM A CONVERSATION BETWEEN A FRIEND OF MINE  AND I:

PASTORIUS: More interesting than the improbable numbers (election fraud) is the question of whether Trump is rallying up to actually push for Biden to not be inaugurated.

Gateway Pundit is a very rah rah Trump website, but they also got a lot of the Russia Russia Russia stuff before anyone else. I'm sure they aren't completely off. And in the past couple of days they have posted several stories which indicate Trump is actually not going to cooperate with the transition of power.

First there is the widely acknowledged story that Trump took away Biden's Pentagon briefings. This could be simply temporary because of the Cyber attack ("Pearl Harbor")

There's also the information in this post.

What do you think? Do you think Trump will try to hold on? If so, it's gonna get weird and ugly. 

I mean, what are they going to do? Send the military in to pull him out of the White House? 

I can't imagine. 

A lot of Leftie friends of mine are saying Trump is merely doing all this to raise money. Do you think that's the reason? Do you think he is just trying to put on a big show to raise money? 

FRIEND:

I haven't looked into these things in detail (because I don't see the point), but yeah, my guess would be that you can get (total voters)>(registered voters) if there are a lot of same-day-registration voters, or they really relaxed all the rules about whether you need to be 'registered' and stuff.

Which, obviously, they did.

Does that mean there wasn't fraud and ballot-box-stuffing and double-voters? No, it doesn't mean that. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a lot of fraud. I wouldn't be surprised if there was enough fraud to steal the election.

But even if so, it doesn't matter now. As I think I said before, I don't think any of this will amount to anything whatsoever. Biden will be sworn in. Period. Anything else is complete fantasy.

Why is Trump still entertaining these ideas? I think in a way he still lives in his own little fantasy-world of how things work. This has been a problem with his Presidency the whole time. I'm not original in this observation: he has always had an 11-year-old-kid's conception of being President that it means you just get to decide everything and it happens, and then has been continually frustrated that it hasn't turned out that way. It's understandable because his experience of power/authority/organizations (and the TV show) seems to be, sitting in an office and yelling at people to Make The Stuff He Wants Happen, and if they don't they get fired but if they do he keeps them around.

Well, now he (understandably) doesn't like that he lost, and he genuinely believes it was stolen (possibly correctly), and he does have people whispering in his ear (Powell, Flynn) telling him the same, so he likes that and keeps them around. But he has no meaningful plan or idea of how to actually fight this outcome, no sense of the organizational or constitutional/legal rules and constraints and bureaucratic terrain or actual puppet-strings of power around it all, and no meaningful base of deep loyalty or allegiance within any of the institutions. There's just literally no realistic prospect of him or the small number of people around him on his side doing or accomplishing anything that would make Biden not be the next President. It's like 7 people, most of them considered crackpots, by literally everyone in DC.

Is Trump doing it for the money? Not only. But Trump is a tricky case. I don't think you can ever separate the money motive in his mind. I think almost everything Trump does could be viewed as 'for money' but that's a narrow filter. It's more like, Trump does stuff out of instinctive tactics. And money is optionality, so he will follow that where it takes him.

I do think it's probably true that some of the others around him indulging this fantasy (Powell, Lin Wood) are basically being 'grifters' and keeping the gravy-train going because money is coming in. It might also be that Trump's kids, Eric and Ivanka and Trump Jr, as well as Kushner, have encouraged him to perpetuate this stuff (even though they know it's gonna go nowhere) because it's still causing cash to come in for the time being. Wouldn't surprise me.

In a weird way, I see Trump as least pure-money-motive out of them all. I think Trump genuinely thinks Trump is right and Trump really won. :)

PASTORIUS: I think Trump is right about most things, and I think he did win.

He is more right than any other President we have had during my lifetime. 

The weaknesses you note notwithstanding, he is right about America First, American jobs, American citizenry, renegotiating trade, Europe' contribution to it's own military, Poland and Hungary as the future of Europe, Constitutional Conservative judiciary, no trans in the military, American military power, strategy on ISIS, no foreign wars unless America is threatened, getting troops out of Afghanistan, the Deep state's threat to the American Constitutional Republic, and that the election was stolen.

That is an awful lot of stuff to be right about. And no other President was right (in policy) about that many things during our lifetime.

Were they?

FRIEND: He has a lot of instincts that I agree with (most of them are just 'old-fashioned' Generic Normal Person Knee-Jerk Opinions that most grownups would've had 40 years ago). But the important thing is that he also has an almost complete immunity to feedback, criticism or embarrassment from his peers, meaning he will never apologize or let someone else tell him what is 'correct'. Hence he has been immune to 'political correctness' of any kind (unlike Biden, who used to say most of the same stuff 30 years ago, but now states policy positions as if deep down he's a generic woke feminist college girl. Why? Because the people around him tell him to, and he has absorbed the idea that such opinions are what is 'correct' and lead to power)

This all adds up to a kind of superpower for Trump because it made him the only vehicle for many of us to push back against the lefty pink fascism our society keeps building, so that's why he won, and that's why I wanted him to win, and was glad when he did.

The downside of that superpower though is that his feedback-immunity means he doesn't even really pay attention to the machinations and power allegiances/structures of the people around him (until it's too late). So for example, even when it was clear that basically the entire Department of Justice was (and still is?) working 24/7 to try to throw him and his family in jail over the Russia stuff, or dumb paper 'crimes' that they could use the Russia stuff as a fishing-expedition to cook up, he acted as if nothing was happening that couldn't be fixed by whining about it all on twitter. Steve Sailer has also made this observation, that Trump just shows a lack of imagination or laziness about keeping track of and counteracting the ways people scheme against him.

Which is also why he didn't notice how (D)s were planning to pack the vote in the spring/summer with all the last-minute rules changes (which was pretty obvious to most of us), and didn't push back against it effectively, when it might have helped. Now, it's just too late.

Coups, or overturning/ignoring elections, are usually done by some charismatic guy who is loved by, like, everyone in the army including some critical-mass of loyal generals. Something like that. Some kind of strong power base. But you can't wage a coup by whining on twitter and then getting a couple outcast/weird lawyers in a room and ask them if there's some loophole or something that will let him do a coup, or tweeting about a judge he hopes will rule this way or that, or pointing at some dumb blog post or interview given by Michael Flynn and saying 'hey, what if we try that'. It just doesn't work that way. He has no actual 'foot soldiers' on his 'side'. It's all pure fantasyland thinking. He just doesn't seem to fully comprehend or take an interest in actual institutions, power structures, scheming people around him, who is allied with whom, what the numbers are, what the actual field of power-battle is like. He's too important to pay attention to that kind of small stuff :) 

Ironically for a New York real estate guy, Trump comes across as seeming like he has no actual capacity to, like, scheme. It's too hard, and it seems like he thinks that's beneath him somehow. Maybe he just naturally expects others to scheme on his behalf and then checks back in later to see if they did, or complains that they didn't. 

It's all been kind of fascinating to watch :) But, it's also why he's a one-term President.