The fag end of the Trump presidency is here. The Capitol building has been stormed by his supporters, following a ‘stop the steal’ rally outside the Whitehouse, at which the President himself spoke. Trump spent some 90 minutes peddling bullshit about electoral fraud that he himself has come to believe, like a Soviet Commissar uncritically accepting unfeasibly high production figures in a 5-year plan report. There was of course some fraud in the US election, in a country of 350 Million people there would have to be. But the incidents of fraud which have been documented and verified are nowhere near the scale required to overturn this election, and any who have been paying attention to the evidence in a clearheaded way can see that. The claims by Lin Wood, Sidney Powell, Giuliani and others, namely that the Dominion voting software was part of a Communist Chinese/Venezuelan cabal, and that millions of votes were switched from Trump to Biden are totally baseless. No evidence for these allegations has been forthcoming. They are the fantasies of fantasists, which seemed momentarily plausible only because of the stature of those who postulated them. But it is now clear that despite being highly intelligent, they have all lost their minds. And if they haven’t, then I have. But they have convinced Trump, who has motivation to reason so, the presidency being on the line and all.
Let’s be clear. What happened on the 6th of January, was not a coup, an insurrection or an act of terror. It was a protest which descended into a violent riot. At no point was the government in danger of being overthrown. The only fatalities, tragically, were 4 Trump supporters who died or were killed, including an air force veteran, her name was Ashli Babbit.
There is little doubt that had congress people not been evacuated, the mob which had been whipped up would have meted out some level of violence to them, probably something akin to chucking someone in the trash, as happened to a Ukrainian politician in 2014. Maybe it would have been worse, I don’t know. The fury had been progressively whipped up from election day, culminating in the storming of congress. But invariably there were other frustrations from the Trump supporter's perspective; being penned in by lockdowns, witnessing the success of BLM and their use of similar tactics, the loss of the Georgia Senate races, and Trump being side-lined by the GOP who vetoed his attempts to give all Americans $2000 and end Article 230. It was a boiling pot, and Trump ought to have known what would come of his rally under such circumstances.
Trump did a lot of good during his term. I have spoken about how he was one of only a select few presidents to raise the income of the poorest Americans for example. But instead of going out on a high, as a successful businessman who became President and then retired to become a GOP grandee, he has chosen to hunker down like a doomed despot and alienate virtually everyone who had supported him hitherto, other than his voters of course, who have an undying love for him. ‘We love you!’ is now as much a staple of a chant as ‘USA’ at a Trump rally.
Trump is right to be annoyed at the election result, the Washington Post, a newspaper owned by Amazon CEO and Trump-hater Jeff Bezos, teamed up with ABC to put together an opinion poll in the run up to the election. That opinion poll said Trump was a total of 17-points behind Biden in the state of Wisconsin. On the day Trump fought Biden to a virtual tie in Wisconsin, losing by only 10,000 votes, a fraction of a percent. One of the things that Trump was right about, was the fake polls. The only way you can be 17 points out is by negligence or malice. Oh, and he was also right about the vaccine, but that’s another story. Anyway, this poll was published all over US news media, and the suppressive effect it had in the state can not be quantified, though could well have been decisive. So-called suppression polls are a source of legitimate grievance, but aren’t sufficient enough of a concern to overturn an election. And phenomena like it have exacerbated the legitimacy crisis surrounding the election (which Trump instigated, for those in doubt). Trump should have done as I expected he would, hold his head up high, and get some good stuff done while he could, like pardoning Assange for example, which he still hasn’t done. Instead, he has allowed his legacy to be marred, and his position in the GOP going forward is now in question.
Let’s not buy the media spin that this was some kind of terrorist attack we witnessed. But it does indicate that words have power and that Trump’s words over time had the power to make masses of people believe that this election was stolen by a shadowy globalist cabal. It wasn’t. He made big campaign mistakes, his own party are a massive liability, and there were genuine incidents of fraud and media/polling malpractice. But the historic rebellion of January the 6th, and the tragic loss of life it wrought, needn’t have happened. And this is how it ends – with the apparent vindication of Trump’s critics. Trump is the President only in the name, stripped even of the power to Tweet, alone, in the White House. The End.
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