The cult of Trump and the dangerous hypocrisy of Republicans

So the Republicans are up in arms at the fact that Trump has been indicted 4 times now, facing dozens of counts. What you can’t talk to your friends or allies anymore, they ask. What happened to free speech? While free speech is protected, there is a difference between expressing your views e.g. “I think all banks are run by thieves” and conspiring to, or committing a crime. e.g. walking into a bank and saying “empty the register and put all the money in this bag or someone’s going to get hurt” is NOT protected free speech. Nor, for that matter, is “asking” a governor to “find” more votes so you can commit electoral fraud. Nor is it legal to impersonate electoral officials. If only there was a way to decide if someone was guilty or not? Oh, wait there is, its called a “trial“.

But the authorities are biased against Trump, his supporters say. Actually, its been quite apparent how he’s being treated like royalty, compared to your average American’s experience of the criminal justice system. For most suspects in the US, you are looking at being hauled in while cuffed (assuming the cops didn’t just shoot you), being booked into jail (strip searched, full cavity body search, put in an orange jump suit, locked up till your arraignment, etc.), finger printed and having your mug shot taken. In most cases he’s sailed through this process, or skipped large parts of it entirely. He’s also gotten bail, while many suspects (in particular those at the lower end of the income spectrum) end up incarcerated until trial. He still gets to plead not guilty, when many suspects get pressured into a plea deal. He’s got the presumption of innocence, when again many minority or poorer suspects are often treated as guilty from the point of arrest onwards.

For some interesting parallels, this same week a teenager was arrested & handcuffed in America while taking out the garbage (I think you can probably guess why that happened). And a few weeks ago police raided a newspaper office because they heard the paper was going to do a negative story about them (republicans being of course the ultimate snowflakes). And predictably, while everyone else was shocked by these stories, the Trumpers were saying, oh surely the police just made a mistake, no harm done. Republicans don’t understand the concept of hypocrisy. Trump’s arrest is the ultimate expression of white privilege.

Some on the left seem to think its a slam dunk. However, this ignores how US justice is very much a pay to win system. They also might not be considering the possibility that one of his fanatical supporters ends up on the Jury who then disrupts the process. Or a pro-Trump judge just gives him a free pass (as is happening in Florida). Never mind the possibility that he just throws his co-conspirators under the bus and they take the fall for him. You can’t be the cult of Trump without a Trump.

More worryingly is the racial charged attacks by Trump against court officials, the doxxing of grand jury members and how several leading republicans are talking up the idea of civil war, when they should be trying to calm things down. This is dangerous talk, given how well armed and crazy many of his supporters are. And its not just Trump supporters, many on the left or minorities have taken to arming themselves and forming their own militia since Trump took office. So its not too difficult to see how things could kick off.

Hence, one has to ask the question, why aren’t any of these provocateurs also being arrested? Why isn’t Trump being denied bail and issued with a gag order? After all, what would happen if Bernie or Ilhan Omar called for civil war?…how many seconds would go by before they got arrested by a hundred FBI agents? Why are republicans being given a free pass? And they have the nerve to claim the justice system is biased against them.

As for civil war, such a conflict would also be pointless. To what end are you going to fight a civil war? To ensure president’s are above the law and don’t have to suffer any consequences for their actions? Given the various hair-brained attempts by Republicans to impeach Biden, the Clintons & Obama, this would be the supreme irony. Are republicans going to apologise for wasting everyone’s time? How about reimbursing the rest of the country for the costs of those campaigns? And if president’s are effectively de-facto dictators from now on, let me know how that works out once a hard left president takes over (which actually becomes more likely in a post-civil war scenario).

And who are you proposing to fight? Biden? He’s got little to do with this, as these indictments are either a justice department issue, or have been issued at the state level. Even if you could overthrow Biden (you’ve got your AR-15’s, trouble is the US army have tanks, fighter aircraft and nuclear weapons), that won’t change anything. You could try overthrowing the entire US criminal justice system, but then who is going to enforce the law in the US? Are you just going to let all the other criminals and suspects (such as Hunter Biden) off the hook as well?

Then there’s the idea that the red states should just break away and form their own country….presumably called Jesusland (then again Jesus was kind of woke). Well aside from the fact that such a civil war would bankrupt America, as much of its wealth comes from overseas investors, who see America as a safe place to store their wealth (which would hurt pensioners & America’s wealthy the worst…i.e. the people who vote republican). But the real problem for Trumpers is that the bulk of America’s population is concentrated in blue states, which includes most of its wealth (specifically the wealth that can’t be easily moved out of the country). Indeed most blue states are net contributors to federal taxes (they send to DC more than they get back), while red states are net receivers of federal money (benefit’s scroungers to use republican terminology). In fact, even with in red states, many cities, which represent most of the wealth and tax revenue, lean left.

So such a split would leave Jesusland in a precarious financial situation, where they simply won’t be able to afford current spending commitments, requiring either massive tax increases, or significant spending cuts, or probably both. So you’d be fighting a war to abolish generous farm subsidies, state pensions, veteran benefits, medicare/medicaid, military spending, cut funding to police & prisons, while simultaneously pushing up taxes. And the bulk of what revenue and wealth that remained in Jesusland, would be dependant on those left leaning cities, who would literally control the purse strings. In short, for Trump supporters the world would suddenly become very fair very quickly. And that’s exactly what republicans don’t want to happen.

And least we forget, who is going to benefit the most from a civil unrest? Well, America’s enemies. Champagne corks will be flying in Moscow and Pyongyang if that ever happened. Hence why I’m totally sure they aren’t secretly manipulating things behind the scenes with their large armies of twitter trolls and bots.

Now I’d like to say it won’t happen, but we are in the post-truth and dark enlightenment era. Plenty of other train wrecks the right have pushed for have happened, be it brexit, Trump’s presidency, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, revoking Roe v Wade, all with predictable results. So unfortunately, I don’t think we can rule it out.

So this sort of dangerous rhetoric needs to have consequences (as in more republicans arrested). After all, we only got here thanks to Trump’s constant provocative, corrupt and illegal actions in office, without any push back. Republicans had the chance to impeach him after January 6th, bar him from office and draw a line under this, but they didn’t.

Largely because republican politicians don’t want to represent their constituents. They want to rule them. From their large mansions and secure gated communities, they see this whole circus as another manufactured controversy, like woke, anti-trans, Obamacare, etc. Its just a way to rile up the base. So what if people get hurt. So long as its not us or our wealthy donors, we don’t care. But its the sort of thing that could so easily run out of their control.