As legit law firms drop out of Trump's legal team, Trump decides to put Rudy Giuliani in charge. This is more or less an admission that the actual court cases are hopeless and now the whole effort is about bluster, which is how Trump maintains his following. Who better, then, than the 2nd greatest blusterer on the American scene, Rudy Giuliani?
But the whole purpose now is not to somehow stay in office, but to leave office with his 48% believing he'd actually won. Here's a prediction: soon after the inauguration of Joe Biden, Trump will announce his candidacy for the 2024 nomination. This is a low-cost way for him to begin taking in huge amounts of money, paying off the debts of his last campaign, and operating as a kind of shadow-president, blasting away at Biden for the next 4 years.
Just a prediction. Maybe it won't happen quite that way, but if it does, that will surely make things difficult for any alternative Republican candidacy. If anyone was hoping for some sort of battle for the soul of the Republican Party, that hope is probably in vain.
No one can predict the future, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if things played out this way. It's also what Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo believes: Trump Shifts Gears.
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If I learned anything about politics from my parents, it was that I should always be very skeptical about what politicians say. All politicians. Both parties. Period.
Over the years I have had occasion to be less skeptical about certain politicians than others, and I have come to think that blanket skepticism is no more rational than blanket acceptance. So then I am not quite as uniformly sketpical as my parents were, but still pretty damn close!
Many of Trump's supporters will admit, on occasion, that their man is a great liar. And yet they are never actually skeptical of what he says. If they can find some weird alt-news website that echoes the lie, they consider that verification enough, and the lie becomes a kind of holy writ among them.
Though their skepticism of all others remains in tact, nothing is left of it where Trump is concerned. He exists in a realm above ordinary considerations of empiricism, rationality, logic, or even any values that rest on the ascertaining of truth. And that magic realm is theirs as well.
This is starting to sound like a mass psychosis, and perhaps it is. You might think that people, once lied to, might become more skeptical about whatever comes from the mouth of the liar. That would be a kind of wisdom, right? But this is not happening. The denizen of Trump World does not become more skeptical after all the lies, but in fact merely transfers his skepticism to everything else, but toward the serial liar he remains an awe-struck true-believer. He is only skeptical of whatever does not comport with the lies of the great man. The rest is all Swamp, Fake News, shadowy elites behind the scenes, and only their man, the true hero, remains untouched by the taint.
I think that the need for a true perception of reality is baked into humankind from the beginning, but also baked-in is the need for story, for drama, and for heroic myths. It behooved our forebears to know whether that rustle in the tall grass was just the wind, or a crouching tiger, but also to sing songs about the hero who fought the tiger and won.
Maturity, perhaps, is to know when to enjoy the story, and when to come back to reality. What we have now is a nation of people for whom that ability has deteriorated. This makes us open to lies, prone to be taken advantage of by con artists and power-grabbers. What we need is not an alternate hero, but a return to our right mind.
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