An Election and a Warning

Sometime Tuesday night, probably around 9pm Eastern Time, Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump will declare victory in the presidential election.

He will do so in the same rambling, semi-coherent monotone he has used for the last few years as his mental condition has deteriorated into an angry and paranoid dementia, smug with the reassurance of a man who feels the world owes him whatever he wants whenever he wants and who has never once in his life faced any consequences for his actions.

He will do so regardless of the actual vote totals. He will likely do so more strenuously if the results show him losing, in fact. It’s not about reality. It’s about creating a pretext for action.

Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has not been trying to win a majority of the votes, after all. He has tried twice before and been overwhelmingly rejected both times, though once – thanks to the partisan gerrymandering of the Electoral College – he slithered into power anyway. He knows he cannot win the majority of the votes of Americans. He will lose the popular vote by somewhere between two and eight million votes, just as he has always done. It’s been eight years with this sad clown. Nobody has changed their minds about him in his favor. He has made no effort to broaden his base of supporters or reach out beyond the hardcore MAGA cult. His entire campaign has instead been a setup, laying the groundwork for the next stage of the ongoing right-wing coup against the United States.

When Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump makes his declaration, the extremist right-wing machinery that surrounds him and props him up like the hollow man he is will shift into high gear and launch its all-out war on the electoral process. There will be lawsuits. There will be threats. There will be hoarsely shouted assertions that the only acceptable alternative is to install Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump into power because any result that doesn’t do that must by definition be fraudulent.

There will be blood.

Make no mistake, folks. The neofascist right has been gearing up for this moment for years, ever since they were forced to back down in January 2021. They recognize no laws but their own privilege. They recognize no morals but their own desires. They think they can shoot their way to power. It has happened before, after all, in other places and other times, and the United States is not immune to history. The FBI and US intelligence agencies have reported that the chatter in right-wing circles online almost exactly mirrors what it was in early January 2021 when the neofascists nearly overthrew the government and installed their dictator into office against the will of the American people. The leaders and masters of that insurrection have walked free so far, and an insurrection that goes unpunished is called a dress rehearsal.

They have the support of millions of GOP voters who think they’re not neofascists but are deluding themselves - a PRRI survey conducted in the last couple of weeks noted that 24% of Republican voters think Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump should seize power regardless of the actual outcome of the election. That’s what dictators do. That’s what Fascists do. That’s what 24% of Republicans think is appropriate in the United States.

One out of four, more or less.

The neofascists do not control the levers of power at the moment, however. They do not control the military. They do not control the security forces. And most Americans want to see this country continue the centuries-old tradition of the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next, a tradition that was brutally shattered in January 2021. The flip side of that PRRI poll, after all, is that three out of four Republicans – along with near unanimous majorities of Democrats and Independents – reject the idea that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump should seize power regardless of the election results, as all Americans should do. Unless all of that changes the neofascists cannot win, but they can do damage.

Americans must be prepared to face this onslaught and see it defeated. Americans must be prepared to block those who would destroy the republic and replace it with dictatorship.

Americans must be ready.

We will say to the neofascists, we outnumber you. We will say to them, we will see you fail. We will say to them, we will see you forgotten, your plans turned to dust, your names turned to ashes, your memory erased.

Watch your back, my fellow Americans. Tomorrow is not the end of this contest, but simply the beginning of the next phase.