They Can Run, But the GOP Can’t Hide from Trump

Trump, probably lying. Again.

We all have a lot of hope that the new Biden/Harris administration will bring some sanity, dare I say ‘normalcy’ to the country, but we also are staring at a Republican party determined to stop them from doing, anything, that will actually help the country. Mitch McConnell and the Republicans under Obama made the recovery from the Bush crash longer and more painful than it needed to be, simple as that, and did so deliberately knowing they were hurting people. As McConnell said, his job was to make Obama a ‘One-Term President’. It wasn’t to legislate, it wasn’t to help right the country after eight years of ruinous leadership, no, his only job was to ‘win’, not help. Obama had to fix the economy and pass the ACA without help from the GOP.

Obama had Mitch and the co-opped ‘Tea Party’ to contend with, Biden and Harris will have a GOP that is even father right. The Tea Party believed Obama was a Muslim radical, born in Kenya. The new version of the Tea Party, Oanon (with has taken over a lot of the base, and electing followers) believe all Democrats are Satan worshiping pedophiles who torture children to harvest a drug called Adrenochrome. Qanon is what is firing up the Republican base, and the god of Qanon is Trump. The leaders of the GOP have a choice;

One: cast off Trump and all the ugly he has revealed about the party,

Two: try to court Qanon and keep it under control, or

Three: just dive in and go nuts.

Far so, they’re doing both two and three.

The push since the election is just go plain full-on crazy, the more the better. I don’t see any signs of that stopping anytime soon. Going forward, the GOP/Trump/Qanon party, already a party of White grievance, will become all about that, it will fuel and drive it. It will be about ‘stolen elections’, about the shrinking White demographic, about ‘biased media’ (even Fox is taking hits for not towing the Trump line and lies), it will retreat even further into its bubble world, and it will strike out with the blind fury of a wounded animal. Trump knows a good grift when he sees it, and so does his family and all their enablers. He’s already shown he doesn’t care about the country, he’ll burn it all down just to get his way, so he’ll keep pushing, keep lying and keeping telling the people who want to believe that he, and they, were robbed.  

And they’ll believe him.

The Georgia and national Republicans are looking at polls showing the two senate races there either tied of the Democrats slightly ahead. Those polls are also showing them something else; Trump’s lies of ‘voter fraud’ and ‘rigged elections’ are causing some of his more fevered supporters to stay home. This can’t be good for them, but they can’t say anything out loud, even Perdue and Loeffler, the Republicans in the race, have to finesse their way around the crazy, calling the election and unfair while at the asking people to vote for them.

Crazy, right?

In 2022 we’ll see a wave of the crazy unlike anything we’ve seen before. Those Republicans running for reelection will have to either take the pledge and be just as crazy as the rest, or run the risk of being primaried by someone who is crazier than they are, or at least does a good job of acting that way.

So, what’s the Biden/Harris administration going to do the get even some of their agenda through the coming wall of craze?

Biden has a couple different ways to deal with this. Hopefully, he will not try to be collegial and work with them. I know, I know, that’s always the goal, to ‘work across the aisle, be bi-partisan. If Biden learned nothing from the Obama years, he should have learned that the Republicans are bad actors, they do not negotiate in good faith. Even those that might agree in private are going to be pushed, squeezed to the wall by the base who will demand blood… and they don’t really care which side bleeds; the Satanist Democrats, or the RINO’s who let their beloved Trump down. It’ll a race to prove which Republican is the most irresponsible, and that’s the Republican that will go forward. 

Right now, McConnell is saying the new administration won’t even get cabinet positions confirmed unless he personally approves of them, won’t even get a vote. No, unless he gets the Senate, (and maybe not even then) Biden will have to go it alone as much as possible, get things done administratively rather than through congress. And it won’t be easy, as every more will be protested, will be dragged into the courts. It wouldn’t surprise me to see the Republicans filling out lawsuits now, to fill in the blanks later.

Biden is going to have to move fast, blitz the field before 2022, when chances are he might lose his House majority. He can do this with multiple teams pushing his agenda at the same time. I assume right now they’re readying Executive orders to sign, and they should do as much as they can as fast as they can, confuse and disorient the opposition into trying to figure out and deal with the numbers of different things coming out. Just as Trump does with outrages, committing new ones before the furor over the last one died out, Biden can do with policy. A Trump tactic for the good of the country.

That might be the best thing we’ll learn from Trump.