Category: politics

Trump’s Third Term Scare

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

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Every so often, the three-shirt-wearing human blister known as Steve Bannon emerges from his podcast studio to interact with human beings who occasionally wash their hair.

In one recent occurrence, Bannon sat down for an interview with the editors of The Economist, a magazine not generally known for platforming incoherent rants by lunatics, yet laboring under the incorrect assumption that “liberalism demands dialogue with those who oppose it.”

It does not. And yet, in the middle of an otherwise anodyne chat about whatever bullshit is on his mind, Bannon uncorked this meatball of crazy:

“Well he’s gonna get a third term. Trump is gonna be president in ‘28 and people ought to just get accommodated with that. At the appropriate time we’ll lay out what the plan is, but there’s a plan and President Trump will be the president in ‘28.”

Strictly speaking, unless Father Time decides to speed up the inevitable, Trump will be president in 2028, because his term doesn’t end until January 20, 2029.

But that’s not what Bannon meant. What Bannon meant was that Trump will circumvent the 22nd Amendment, run for an unconstitutional third term in office thanks to some nebulous “plan”, win that election, and be president until 2033, whereby his followers believe he’ll just do it again and again. So that’s great.

Trump, of course, has been talking about a third term on and off for years. He’s selling “Trump 2028” swag on his website, and was “not joking” when he claimed “a lot of people want him to” throw out the Constitution and make a grab for an eternal presidency.

He’s been doing that same “joking/not joking” dance since 2018, where he’s claimed that he might give a lifetime presidency a shot, and other times where he said he was going to run for four terms, deserved “extra years” because he was impeached, and even hinted at constitutional loopholes that would allow him to serve as a VP or Speaker for one day, then have everyone above him resign to be an unelected president. Hey, if Gerald Ford could do it…

On the flip side, he’s also said that he also has no intention of trying for a third term, and that he only sells 2028 merch and hints at another run to “drive the left crazy.” Which…works? Witness the absolute furor over Bannon’s remarks, which is the only reason why anyone outside the subscriber base of The Economist knew they’d spoken to Steve Bannon. The guy knows what makes the left insane and terrified, and damn if he isn’t going to provide it.

Now we’ve had days of the news cycle hijacked by this nonsense. The government is in shutdown mode, health insurance premiums are about to explode, and federal law enforcement is turning cities into war zones. But we’re talking about Steve Bannon and about Trump running for a third term, not anything that’s actually possible or legal.

Of course, when has Trump ever been stopped by something being impossible or illegal? Dude just does what he wants, when he wants, and how he wants – and knows his retinue of bootlickers and apologists will go along with it. He wants us afraid and believing he is unstoppable and inevitable, so why bother trying?

Tear down the East Wing? Incite a mob to sack the Capitol? Kill random fishermen and kidnap people off the streets for not being white? Deploy troops in the streets? Fuck you, try to stop me.

And so back we go to the prospect of a third term. It’s only illegal if laws mean something. It’s only impossible because nobody has tried it since the 22nd Amendment was passed. Trump might not always mean what he says, but he never says anything he doesn’t mean. Right?

It’s a losing game to try to deduce what Trump “really” is talking about at this point.  The whole “take him seriously/take him literally” thing has been a bust since 2016. But it’s been helpful to me to think of Trump running again as a type of invasion scare.

England in both the 19th and 20th centuries has been seized by stretches of terror that an invasion fleet was about to land on its shores. From Napoleon in the 1810s to Hitler in 1940, Britons were hunkering down, digging in, and preparing for the transports to appear on the horizon.

Both times, the threat was real, but it also wasn’t. Napoleon had no way to stop the Royal Navy from intercepting and destroying a potential invasion fleet, even though he had the men and transports to land in southern England, destroy the Channel ports, and possibly march on London.

Hitler didn’t even have that – he was hoping that repurposed river barges would be enough to land troops and tanks in England, and that the Royal Navy and Air Force would just politely allow it to happen.

In hindsight, the threats were massively overblown. But at the time, nobody knew that, or at least nobody could say it with 100% confidence. The fear was real, and it was enough to drive British policy, military deployment, economics, and psychology to the brink of mass panic. If either Napoleon or Hitler had even tried to invade England, it would have been a disaster and a total failure. But try telling that to someone in the path of a possible invasion. You don’t know until you know.

Like a cross-Channel invasion, an attempt by Trump to run for a third term would be a disaster for him. It’s probably not even physically possible. Trump is exhibiting clear signs of physical and cognitive decline, including taking two annual exams this year, admitting to having an MRI and swelling in his ankles, and exhibiting at least some signs of a stroke. It’s hard to get riled up by the possibility of Trump 2028 when Trump might not actually make it to 2028 in any kind of shape to govern.

Beyond that, the longer Trump and his enablers muse about various plans for 2028, the harder it makes things for actual 2028 candidates like Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. If Trump keeps hinting at a 2028 run, what is the rest of the GOP going to do? Sure, they’ll probably go along with it, but what if they don’t? There’s no reason for these people to shackle their political futures to an 82 year old man who thinks he’s the King of Israel and brags about acing a test where you identify an elephant. They have careers, too.

If Trump spends half of 2027 kicking around the idea of going for it, nobody else will be able to fundraise, hire staff, or lay the groundwork for an announcement. He would be kneecapping his own succession. Maybe that’s why he’d do it, because nobody else can do the job but him, even if he can’t do the job.

So what if he does go for it? What if he announces the day after the midterms that he’s running again? Fuck you, try to stop me.

Absolute chaos for the GOP, and the fundraising haul of the century for the Democrats would be among the first two things to happen. And there would probably a blizzard of lawsuits that keep Trump off the ballot in any state with a Democratic legislature or governor. Because the president doesn’t put himself on the ballot, states do. Elections are run by states. And many states are going to refuse to have anything to do with this nonsense. Because it’s unconstitutional and insane.

Imagine the GOP trying to hold a primary while Trump has announced a fourth run for office. How does that work? Trump declines more and more, while shoving anyone else out of the way, and destroying anyone who dares to try to mount a legitimate campaign. Meanwhile, various courts spend months kicking lawsuits around, and Trump is disqualified from appearing on ballots of states that he won in 2024, but that have Democratic governors – states the Republicans would need, like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Taking this ludicrous scenario to its conclusion, 2028 sees Trump running a fake and illegal primary campaign against real Republicans. The party is split in two with Trump “winning” states he can’t win, while a legitimate contender finds himself iced out of ballots on red states that would allow Trump to actually compete.

Could we have a Democrat win some states, Trump “win” others, and a different Republican win a few? How does any of this work? Why would anyone be okay with it, when Trump is declining so fast he might not even be coherent by then?

Sure, maybe the GOP just lets him do it, but even if it’s guaranteed to lead to a Newsom or Pritzker presidency? It seems unlikely. We have courts and laws, and while Trump can just do a lot of things by himself as president, running for a third term is not one of those things. It would take a massive buy-in by his entire party, and as his polling and health decline, the prospect of that buy-in declines just as quickly.

Ultimately, the third term can be effective as a scare tactic, but it’s not a real political strategy. Neither are even goofier scenarios, like Trump running as Vance’s VP and then Vance resigning on day 1, or exploiting slight differences in the wording of Constitutional amendments about presidential eligibility, or some magical amendment reversing the 22nd. Those things might be theoretically possible, but they aren’t practical or feasible.

The most likely scenario is that Trump ultimately tells himself and the country he could run for a third term and win if he wanted to, but he doesn’t want to. That lets him save face, play kingmaker for 2028, and still keep liberals scared and conservatives in line with the prospect of a sudden about face. He’s not a lame duck, he can convince himself, just a man who has Made America Great Again, and can go back to doing what he loves. Whatever that is.

Invasion scares fizzle out when the invader can’t run away from the reality of their situation anymore. Napoleon and Hitler both called off their invasions when it was clear they had no chance of success, and even trying to do so would be a complete disaster. Trump is almost certain to do the same, given the enormous opposition and low probability of actually accomplishing anything other than a humiliating defeat.

Trump 2028 might be a useful piece of trolling and a way to get attention and scare enemies, but that doesn’t mean the fear of it happening isn’t real.

It’s also not inevitable.

There is No Couch

Mike Rothschild

JD Vance, the junior senator from Ohio and Republican nominee for vice president in 2024 did not have sex with a couch and write about it in his book.

Moving past the idea that this is a sentence one has to write in the year 2024, we can start to talk about why anyone thinks he did, why some conservatives and journalists are getting upset about it, and what it all means for the strangest election of all time, or at least the strangest since the election or 2020.

In mid-July (or maybe it was sometime in 1887, it feels like it’s been that long), a Twitter user who goes by @RickRudesCalves tweeted the following:

“can’t say for sure but he might be the first vp pick to have admitted in a ny times bestseller to fucking an Inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (vance, hillbilly elegy, pp. 179-181).”

Other than being named after the leg muscles of the late WWE Intercontinental Champion Rick Rude, there’s not much to go on about who this user is. They’ve chosen to stay anonymous, and there’s no reason to violate that. As for the tweet itself, Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy contains no such passage. People went through the book, quickly found that the reference to the latex glove wasn’t in it, and that should have been that.

But here we are nearly two weeks later, and the Vance/Couch story is pretty much everywhere. It’s been referenced on late night TV, It’s the fodder for more memes and jokes on social media than anyone could possibly count. It’s even jumped the firebreak of normie political speeches, something usually reserved for Trumpian insanity like QAnon, with Democratic vice presidential candidate, MN Governor Tim Walz dropping a “get off the couch” reference in his introductory speech at his first rally for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. When the crowd laughed, he exclaimed “see what I did there!”

We did.

Vance hasn’t responded to the couch allegation, except when he sort of did by making a remark about his wife making him sleep on the sofa if he asked her to come up and speak at a rally, which did nothing to defuse the joke because it was neither a denial nor him leaning into it and defanging it. Also, he used the word “sofa” not “couch,” thereby muddying up the wording of the joke, and proving again that MAGA people don’t know anything about comedy.

The Vance/couch meme has gone on for so long and gotten so far that even journalists and more respectable pundits have said it’s time to retire it, that it’s not funny, that passing it around is akin to spreading misinformation, and that it’s generally beneath the dignity of a presidential election to be discussing a candidate having sex with a couch.

The problem with approaching the Vance/couch story as an actual story is that the Vance/couch story isn’t a story. It’s a joke, intended by its creator to be a joke, and passed around as a joke. Imbuing it with serious solemnity as a piece of a disinformation to be batted down actually makes it funnier. Not only is there a viral joke about the potential vice president fucking a couch, people are actually taking it seriously as something that has to specifically be refuted. Other than maybe the first day when the joke was going viral and it wasn’t clear if the passage was in Hillbilly Elegy, nobody making jokes or sharing memes about it actually thinks he did it. It doesn’t even matter at this point, because the joke is out there, it’s still funny, and getting upset about it only makes in funnier.

But why did it go viral if the people spreading it knew it wasn’t true?

Again, I’ll go back it’s funny. The joke works, and the jokes about the joke work.

But more than that, it works because it fits in with what people believe about JD Vance. Because JD Vance is a weird, creepy, vaguely bizarre human being. He’s endorsed tracking women’s periods to determine if they’d have abortions. He completely flipped on his feelings toward Trump, going from calling him “America’s Hitler” in 2016 to serving as his #2 man on the campaign trail. He’s deeply linked to techno-libertarian weirdo Peter Thiel, who is hellbent on making the world less free and democratic. He’s said multiple times that women who don’t have children should have the power of their vote diluted. He wrote a memoir that was self-serving and full of omissions, about a life he doesn’t seem to have lived. He made a bizarre remark about his wife, who is Indian-American as being a good mother even though she “obviously isn’t a white person.” He’s good friends with a strange collection of racist weirdos and white nationalists, and has endorsed the explicitly racist and antisemitic Great Replacement theory.

And his newest thing seems to be following Vice President Harris around on the campaign trail, giving speeches in cities where she’s holding rallies, to the point of approaching Air Force Two and maybe trying to get on it in Wisconsin. The word you’re looking for there is “stalking.”

This is all very weird, creepy stuff that most normal people find repellent. It’s also the affect of a person who maybe, just maybe, would have sex with a couch and write about it proudly in his memoir.

Again, it’s not believable because it’s true. It’s believable because it seems like it could be true about this particular person, based on what you already believe about them. And the people getting upset about the joke, calling it dehumanizing or disinformation, or just grumping about “decorum” are not only missing the point, they are actively making the joke more alive and vital.

What’s worse than being the subject of a joke about fucking a couch? Being upset that someone else is the subject of a joke about fucking a couch.

Right wing social media has been full of such rumors and myths and conspiracy theories for years. They range from disgusting conspiracy theories like the Sandy Hook shooting being a hoax to transphobic nonsense like Michelle Obama secretly being a man. Many of the same people who extol Trump have spread these rumors as fact, maybe because they believe them, or maybe because enough other people believe them that it’s advantageous to spread them. They’ve been dining off this memetic warfare for years, and now that it’s being volleyed back to them, they can’t handle it.

With the shoe on the other foot, and the Trump campaign unable to shake the label “weird,” these same guys are melting down, flailing in every direction looking for their own version of the couch joke, and failing every time because none of them are funny.

They’re calling Walz “Tampon Tim” because as governor of Minnesota, he signed a law mandating free menstrual supplies in public school. That’s a knee-slapper, for sure. They’re spreading insane conspiracy theories about Harris’s rally crowds being CGI, or echoing Trump’s unhinged claims that President Biden wants to “take back” his candidacy. They’re making up nonsensical nicknames for Kamala Harris that literally nobody other than Donald Trump thinks are funny. And Donald Trump doesn’t think anything is funny.

The couch cope has gotten so bad that it’s led to a pathetic attempt by right wing influencers to create a “Vance/Couch” meme for Walz, with the former president’s equally weird son spreading a limp rumor that the governor was caught drinking horse semen. It didn’t catch on, and the entire attempt smacks of “I know you are but what am I.”

You can’t make something like the Vance/couch joke happen. It has to happen on its own, with a unique combination of humor, virality, and believability. The couch joke was funny, it was written with a fake citation that gave it depth, and most importantly, it was about a guy who you could totally see doing it. And Vance’s lame attempts to run with the joke or the label of “weird” are only making it worse.

Because there is no couch. There is only a very creepy vice presidential candidate who you can totally see bragging about going to pound town with a couch.

The jokes and memes should not let up. Democrats should do more of them, bigger, and bolder. People upset about the joke should stop whining about it, because it makes the joke funnier. And JD Vance, stay the hell away from my sectional.

“You Won’t Have to Vote Again”

Mike Rothschild

As somebody once said, trying to psychoanalyze Donald Trump is like trying to teach hamsters to sing an aria – it will never work and isn’t worth your time.

Sometimes the random stuff he says is really dumb and doesn’t demand analysis to figure out what he’s “really” saying, because he’s saying nothing. Something about sharks and windmills and electric boats, etc. It’s just words that tumble out of an old man’s mouth.

And sometimes the random stuff he says is bone chilling and portentous for an apocalyptic future where America is no longer a free country. Witness Trump’s bizarre and insane comments on July 26th, made when speaking to a summit of Evangelical Christian voters in Florida.

“You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”

Immediately, Democratic activists and journalists claimed that Trump was telegraphing his intention to make himself president for life and do away with elections, either in principle or entirely, after he wins. “You won’t have to vote anymore…because we won’t have voting anymore, you’ll just have Trump and the people Trump picks to succeed him.”

Not all news outlets saw it that way, of course, leaning into the “he just says stuff” narrative that so many have been relying on for so long. For them, Trump’s remarks were more in line with “You won’t have to vote anymore…because it will be so perfect that Evangelicals will have everything they want.”

Obviously, what Trump meant here is not clear, and really hinges on the exact meaning of the words “have to.” Did he mean “get to” or “need to?” Given that we’re talking about the idea of a dictatorship vs. a democracy, that seems important…right?

It would for any other candidate. But again, hamsters and arias. Trying to figure out what Trump means is usually impossible, because it’s likely he doesn’t know. In this case, however, there is a very good argument to be made Trump shouldn’t get the benefit of the doubt about these remarks, because he has already made countless references to him being in office longer than two terms.

Over and over, Trump has publicly endorsed the idea of contravening the 22nd Amendment and running for a third term in office. How would that work, legally? Obviously, he doesn’t know or care. It’s just something he talks about. A lot.

In May, he wondered out loud at the NRA conference, “I don’t know, are we going to be considered three term or two term?” if he won again in 2024. Naturally, his enablers laughed it off as masterful trolling of the overly sensitive media. And maybe it is just trolling and trying to wind up the media to get attention – except he’s been making such comments for years, going all the way back to the last weeks of the the 2020 election.

At a Minnesota rally in August, he “joked” that he wouldn’t come back to the state if he lost it to Joe Biden, “Not for term three, four, five or six.” The next day, he declared that “we’ll go for another four years because they spied on my campaign. We should get a redo of four years.” And he said it again a month later, telling Nevada rallygoers that should he win in 2020, he’d “negotiate” another term, which he was “entitled to.”

Trump has also expressed his approval of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping awarding himself that country’s presidency for life, talked of being awarded “extra time” in office, and made numerous other allusions to somehow getting or being given more years as president than he’s legally entitled to.

His supporters have done the same. In just a few examples of the unhinged drive that “small government conservatives” have for making Donald Trump their god king, disgraced televangelist spawn Jerry Falwell, Jr. tweeted in 2019 that “I now support reparations — Trump should have 2 yrs added to his 1st term as pay back for time stolen by this corrupt failed coup,” a statement Trump tweeted his agreement to. Steve Bannon has claimed, probably rightly, that his audience would be fine with Trump serving a third and even fourth term and then passing the baton off to his sons in the kind of American monarchy that people like Steve Bannon used to oppose. And The American Conservative ran an op-ed just this month that Trump should be able to run for a third term if he wins in 2024 because he’s really popular. That’s the argument.

Obviously, all of this is insane and meaningless. Trump still claims he won the 2020 election (except when he agrees that he lost it) so winning in 2024 would be a “third term” under this entirely non-existent umbrella. There is nobody who can give a president “extra time” or a “redo” or with whom he can “negotiate” more time in office. It should also be noted that other two-term presidents have spoken of hypothetical third terms, including Barack Obama in 2016. Trump has also given interviews where he said he wasn’t interested in a third term, which, again, doesn’t matter because he’s not eligible for one.

And yet…he keeps talking about it. Even if it’s “just trolling” or a “joke,” Trump continues to publicly signal that if he were to win again, he would pull some lever that gave him extra time in office. And given how the Supreme Court has gone off the rails over the last few years, we might find out the 22nd Amendment isn’t quite as clear as we’d like it to be.

But even more than those hypotheticals, Trump has already attempted legal maneuvering to award himself an extra term in office. It was January 6th, 2021 – when a cadre of advisors and influencers followed Donald Trump’s lead and organized a coup attempt to nullify and overturn the results of the 2020 election. Just like Trump’s claims that he was “entitled” to “extra years” in office, he claimed he was entitled to take office again despite losing the election – and his enablers did everything they could to come up with a legal and political framework to make it happen. People died, and America had its first ever election without a peaceful transfer of power.

It’s only absurd and insane until it happens.

So whatever Trump meant by “you won’t have to vote again,” it can’t be decontextualized or swept away. It has to be looked at as yet another reference to our electoral system being thrown out or permanently altered to give one man total control over the government. At some point, there just have to be too many remarks about extra years and third terms and redos and negotiations and being president for life to laugh this off. It’s not a joke, and if it’s meant to be one, it’s not funny.

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Does Donald Trump Actually Think Hannibal Lecter is Real?

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

One of Donald Trump’s signature bits of weirdness in 2024 has been repeated references to the serial killer and cannibal Hannibal Lecter and comparing him to the plight of undocumented migrants crossing the US/Mexico border.

In speeches going back at least to January, Trump has referred to the liver-eating menace – who is fictional – as “legendary,” “the late, great,” “a wonderful man,”

So why is the former (and maybe future?!?) President of the United States talking about a fictional character as if he were real, and about a truly monstrous character being a “wonderful” and “great” guy?

Psychoanalyzing Trump is like trying to get squirrels to sing an aria – impossible and not worth the time. But there are questions here that can be answered through research, and maybe by answering them, we can get at least closer to an answer to the question that can’t actually be answered – what the hell is going with this?

Does Donald Trump think Hannibal Lecter is real?

It’s fairly clear from the context of Trump’s most reported-on reference to the cannibalistic murderer that the former president knows Hannibal Lecter is a character in a movie. During a lengthy ramble at a campaign event in New Jersey in May, Trump went on extended riff about Lecter specifically being a character from The Silence of the Lambs.

“Silence of the Lambs. Has anyone ever seen The Silence of the Lambs? The late, great Hannibal Lecter is a wonderful man. He oftentimes would have a friend for dinner. Remember the last scene? “Excuse me. I’m about to have a friend for dinner,” as this poor doctor walked by. “I’m about to have a friend for dinner.” But Hannibal Lecter. Congrats. The late, great Hannibal Lecter…”

Despite being unfollowable and bizarre, this makes it pretty clear that Trump knows Lecter was a character in a movie, and Trump is known for making copious references to movies and music in his speeches – though his pop culture knowledge pretty much has a hard out in the early 90s. He even references Lecter’s final line in the movie, though it should be noted that Lecter is not actually dead at the end of the movie. Hardly the worst of Trump’s factual abuses.

What does Hannibal Lecter have to do with undocumented immigrants at all?

Nothing really, which is why the reference is so baffling. At first, it seemed like the reference stemmed from Trump confusing asylum seekers – ie, people crossing the border because they are fleeing violence and persecution, and are hoping to be allowed into the country for their safety – with asylums for the insane. This is likely a reference to FBI agent Clarice Starling visiting Hannibal Lecter at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and engineering his release. But none of these things or places are real. And insane asylums in general no longer exist in the United States, nor in much of the rest of the world – though Trump has long called for reopening asylums and institutionalizing more people.

Later, Trump would clarify this bizarre story with his remarks at the Republican National Convention, claiming,

“They’re coming from prisons, they’re coming from jails, they’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums. You know the press is always on me cause I say this. Has anyone seen ‘Silence of the Lambs’?” 

Trump is essentially creating a narrative that other countries are dumping their mentally incapacitated felons on us, which is essentially the same rap that Trump used all the way back in 2015 by kicking off his campaign with the false claim that Mexico was sending rapists and killers in the US. Trump has been making the specific insane asylum claim since at least 2023, and nobody has ever found any evidence this is true. Trump has claimed these are “real stories” but never offers proof to support them, because of course he doesn’t.

Is this the first fictional person Donald Trump has talked about as if they were real?

Not at all! Trump constantly talks about people who may or may not exist with the absolute certainty that they do exist, even if nobody can find them. Trump tells so many stories about burly, tough, great men that probably aren’t real coming up to him with tears in their eyes exclaiming “sir!” and regaling him with how great he is that they even have a name – “sir stories.”

Trump has even told stories about specific people who likely don’t exist. One actually has a name – Jim, a “very, very substantial guy” who used to “go to Paris every year with his wife” but no longer goes to Paris because “Paris is no longer Paris.” When Trump started talking about “Jim who no longer goes to Paris” in 2017, multiple journalists went on a fairly substantial hunt for who he was talking about, but nobody could figure it out. Later that year, Trump claimed he was no longer listening to Jim’s badmouthing of Paris, though, again, it’s not clear who exactly Jim was or whether Jim was real.

This type of easy conflation of real and fake doesn’t stop at people. Trump’s New Jersey golf course has a monument to a horrifying Civil War battle called the “River of Blood” that supposedly took place there, though no historical record or expert can confirm that such a battle ever took place. And Trump consistently brags of his winning the state of Michigan’s “Man of the Year” award some time before 2016, though, again, this award does not exist.

Why is he doing this?

We can’t really know why Trump has picked out Hannibal Lecter specifically, but we have established that Trump doesn’t actually think Lecter is real, that he’s linked Lecter to undocumented immigration through an “asylum” connection that’s not real, and that he’s done this kind of conflation before.

But none of those are reasons why he does it. The real reason might be that Trump doesn’t know what the word “asylum” means, and that would make sense.

But there’s another reason why, and it actually lies in Trump’s comments about his comments on Lecter: that the media “goes crazy” when he does it. A former president and current nominee talking about a fictional serial killer as if he were a real and great guy is newsworthy, and Trump knows it. He knows that it will be written about and get the “lying fake news media” all lathered up. And it’s not as if his supporters care, they love this kind of attention for Trump as much as Trump loves it.

So whether Trump thinks Hannibal Lecter is real, wonderful, and deserving of the Michigan Man of the Year award isn’t the point. We can’t really know if he thinks this is all real or not. The bigger point is that this is just another bizarre and awful and racist thing that Trump talks about, and that Trump knows the media will talk about him talking about. Like so much of Trumpworld, the details don’t matter – only the coverage.

Jim who doesn’t go to Paris anymore would agree. If he existed.

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It’s Not a Coup

Mike Rothschild

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The denunciations and conspiracy theories came fast after President Biden announced he was stepping aside from the 2024 election and endorsing his Vice President, Kamala Harris.

Democratic activists and pro-Biden influencers decried the decision as a coup by monied donors and media figures, disenfranchising the millions of people who had voted for Biden in the 2024 primary. It was nothing less than a mass negation of the 81 million voices who had chosen Biden in 2020, a stab in the back of the most impactful president in a generation, and a seizing of power that went against the very foundations of representative democracy.

Kidding! That was all MAGA-worshipping Republicans who are suddenly very concerned about the sanctity of Democratic voters and stopping insurrections against duly elected presidents.

Yes, the same people who have spent nearly four years claiming Joe Biden was illegitimately elected by 81 million non-existent people are suddenly very angry about the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s election. Conspiracy theory influencers and MAGA mouthpieces who constantly call Democrats pedophiles and demons who must be cleansed from the earth are deeply upset that Democratic primary voters aren’t being listened to and nurtured in their “betrayal.” And those voices who were the loudest in supporting an actual attempt at a coup – the January 6th insurrection, where people died and the Vice President was nearly murdered – are now convinced that Biden stepping down of his own volition is a coup that is somehow worse than that actual insurrection (which, of course, was totally fake.)

Like this dude, a Silicon Valley billionaire weirdo who’s close friends with fellow Silicon Valley billionaire weirdo Elon Musk, might be more convincing in his attempt to apply a “Stab in the Back Myth” to Biden if he hadn’t just spoken at the Republican National Convention claiming that, among other things, Biden “provoked” Russia into invading Ukraine.

How can a person believe that January 6th wasn’t a real insurrection, but Joe Biden being convinced to step aside was? Isn’t this just hypocrisy of the highest order? Or are they really concerned for the future of democracy and feeling like what the Democrats did to him was wrong, even if they don’t like him?

If you’re confused, that’s the point. They don’t actually mean any of this, and none of it is meant to make sense.

The concern, the fear for the future of democracy, the outrage on behalf of Biden voters: it’s all an act. Not a single MAGA influencer or politician actually thinks the nomination was “stolen” from Biden, nor do they care even one bit about the potential disenfranchisement of Democrats. They would rather see Democratic primary voters lined up and shot than be taken seriously in their grievances. Do you seriously believe that people utterly obsessed with passing laws to make voting harder and more exclusive actually care about making votes count?

The people who would literally die to support a president who would never willingly give up power are pretending to decry a president willingly giving up power.

That’s not to say that it’s impossible for people to hold two contradictory beliefs – that Joe Biden is a fake president whose real election is being overturned. That sort of cognitive dissonance is common among conspiracy theorists, with one of the most famous examples being a survey of 9/11 truthers who answered yes to believing both that Osama Bin Laden was already dead when US Special Forces killed him in 2011, and that he’s still alive. Ultimately, the details of conspiracist belief can contradict each other because they’re all made up. Barack Obama could be an incompetent bumbling idiot while also being an evil genius who spent decades pretending to be American with nobody figuring out because both beliefs are fictional, and based on nothing other than wishful thinking.

The Trump supporters claiming that the Democrats ousted Biden in a coup, on the other hand, don’t believe any of it. Their outrage stems not at all from sympathy for pro-Biden Democrats and entirely from wanting Biden to stay in the race. Trump was outpolling Biden in numerous critical swing states, and had driven the Democratic electorate into a kind of apathy that almost certainly portended another Trump victory, and what would then likely be his complete takeover of American society.

With Biden out and Harris presumably in, these people are going to have to completely revamp their approach to winning what had been a moribund election that had seemingly been dragging on for years.

They were adamant that Biden stay in the race because they believed he’d lose. And now that he’s out of the race, they’re pretending those beliefs stemmed from genuine concern for the democratic process, rather than owning the libs and pleasing Trump. In fact, Republicans care so little for Biden’s actual presidency that many are demanding he resign right now rather than play out the last five months of his term.

Yes, the people who still think Biden isn’t the real president want Biden to end his fake presidency because he won’t get the opportunity to be real president again.

This is pure insanity that is not designed to cohere on any level. In fact, there is nothing undemocratic about a candidate making a decision to step back. He can’t be forced to run for president, and if he’s changed his mind, then he can do that for whatever reason.

The only thing anyone needs to know about the right-wing outcry of a “coup” is that it’s meaningless and designed to drive a wedge between Democrats who are now, ironically, more united than at any time during the last year. Republicans are panicking, and it’s transparently obvious.

Nobody knows what happens next, how Harris will do against Trump, or what other surprises this utterly insane election cycle has in store. But one thing we can all agree on is that people who cheered January 6th and called Biden’s stepping aside a coup are hypocrites who can safely be ignored. They are lying to their followers and trying to drive Democrats to distraction with their trolling.

The featured picture of this piece is of the coup of 18 Brumaire, the bloodless revolution of 1799 that ended the French Revolution and brought Napoleon to power as a dictator. That was a seizure of power in a non-violent way that soon led to two decades of brutal war all over Europe.

Joe Biden walking away is a candidate for office deciding he didn’t want to be a candidate for office anymore. It wasn’t a stab in the back, it wasn’t an abrogation of voter wishes, and it definitely wasn’t a coup.

But they know that already.