In “Federalist No. 68,” Alexander Hamilton argued that the Electoral College would “afford a moral certainty that the office of President [would] seldom fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications” and would keep from office candidates with “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity.” In 2020 Trump and his “Road to Victory” goons are trying to coerce Republican legislatures in swing-states to ignore the vote and hand him victory. The Electoral College system explicitly permits this fraud, and 80 million voters who told Trump to fuck off stand to be robbed.
The chattering class scoff and dismiss this as a fever dream. But they were wrong in 2016, and all it takes is someone brazen enough to mount a coup. Democracy can be undone by weak little men like Norman D. Shinkle, Republican bureaucrat from Michigan, who may yet refuse to validate the vote. His comment, “You can’t make up your mind before you get all the facts,” is meaningless given the alt-reality of conservative America, where ‘facts’ aren’t factual unless endorsed by Donald Trump.
On August 4 I wrote: “Agent Orange is planning to steal the next election. He hinted at it this week. Like his idols Putin and Xi, Trump wants to be president for life. Because the world’s biggest infant stands to be humiliated if democratic processes don’t give him what he wants, he will trigger enough trouble (because millenials are so easily triggered) to veto the election and declare martial law. Widespread civil outrage will prompt the mobilisation of pro-Trump militias into the streets, and when Congress finally wake up they’ll move the US Army against Trump. Then you’ll have militiamen fighting soldiers in the street, with you guys in the middle.”
It wouldn’t have mattered if Biden’s margin was 100 million, Trump has been playing the same whiney record since 2016 after sore-losing to Ted Cruz in Iowa:
Okay Ted, let’s look at his record. Look, for example, at how many likes Trump’s comment gathered versus your own. The resentment was there long before 2016. The nation was overripe for dog-whistle politics from a demagogue pretending to champion the rights of Christian zealots claiming a moral mandate, of redneck militias to carry automatic weapons in public, of rubes who believe there’s an international, Democratic-party run paedophile ring operating out of a pizza shop in Washington. How curiously quiet Q has been since Trump’s defeat… Maybe Q stands for quitter?
But instead of rejecting the president’s invitation to the White House, Shinkle obeyed the summons. We may need a new verb — “to shinkle” as a synonym for “to cheat” or “to steal” — as in Donald Trump shinkled the 2020 election. As in never forget the names of the cowardly Republicans who tried to shinkle democracy. Being an optimist, I suspect democracy will prevail and Donald Trump will be relegated to a footnote in history. I’m tired of writing about him. I’m glad to see how, every day, more Republicans begin to bite the hand that fed them. What an awful diet it has been. But if Trumpism won’t die a natural death, then it will be up to Republicans like Norman D. Shinkle to rise up and kill it.
