Burning it all down
Not even one month ago, I wrote this piece. It was evident to me that Trump, floundering in the polls, with a bankrupt campaign, would not go gently into that good night, and would rage and destroy as much as possible before he was expelled from an office which he should have never held.
Well, yesterday, we saw what form that would take:
President Trump on Tuesday abruptly ended talks with Democrats on an economic stimulus bill, sending the stock market sliding and dealing a final blow to an intensive set of on-again-off-again negotiations to deliver additional pandemic aid to struggling Americans before the November elections.
Mr. Trump announced that he was pulling the plug on the effort in a series of afternoon tweets in which he accused Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California of “not negotiating in good faith" and urged Senate Republicans to focus solely on confirming his nominee to the Supreme Court in the coming weeks.
Unlike his earlier gambits, he didn't wait until the markets had closed to make this announcement. As a result, the Dow Jones dropped 700 points immediately after his tweet.
He never cared about Americans. He never even really cared about his supporters. They were simply a means of self-gratification. He was never more alive than when performing in front of the multitudes, like the verminous rabble-rouser he is. But his lumpenproletariat failed him, and they will go down with the rest of us for their failure to engender a fascist makeover of the world's oldest and most powerful democracy.
He doesn't care about winning re-election. And he certainly doesn't care about the fortunes of the party he hijacked. Because of his tweet, thousands will be laid off in the airline industry, in battleground states. Millions will lose income as unemployment ends. And these millions will not blame Joe Biden, who is not president. They will not blame Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi, whom they know have been putting in the midnight oil to help them. The blame will fall squarely on a Republican Party which has marched in lockstep to its doom and demise with a feckless carnival barker and his useless family.
Never has a political party purposely tanked the country to try and make it ungovernable for the incoming administration. Some have said that what Trump is doing is similar to George W. Bush and Barack Obama in 2008. That's a fallacy. Yes, Pres. Bush handed a mess to Pres. Obama. But that was more out of failure than purposefulness. Pres. Bush followed GOP economics, and as always, those plans failed. But he did try to stabilize the financial meltdown. What Trump is doing is sabotage, purely and simply sabotage. Whereas presidents Bill Clinton and Obama had to fix the economic messes of their predecessors, an incoming President Joe Biden will be facing an economy which was purposely destroyed as revenge.
That being the case, the prescriptions which a President Biden might turn to will be more radical than they would have been if Trump had merely slunk off. They might have to be as radical as anything from the New Deal, if not more so. This will include packing the courts to make up for judges appointed by Republican presidents who have lost the popular vote in six out of the previous seven elections. In trying to destroy Joe Biden before he takes office, the GOP is sealing its own doom.
When you sow the wind, expect to reap the whirlwind. The GOP will be destroyed as a viable political party for its obeisance to the orange monster. And the orange monster will do what no president before him has accomplished: die in prison, and destroy his family along with him. His name will supplant that of Benedict Arnold as the ultimate traitor in American mythology. And all this because he hated the country's first Black president. Hubris was the greatest sin for the Ancient Ones. Trump will learn this to his terminal detriment.