What if the Swine Emperor Croaks Tho?

NinaIllingworth October 4, 2020November 5, 2022 2020 US Election, American fascism will outlive Trump, Amerikan Musik, anarchism, AstroTurf, Bill Barr, billionaire fascists, Boogaloo movement, Captain Trips, climate catastrophe, conspiracy, coronavirus, Covid 19, Covid Lockdown Protests, dark money, death cult, ecofascism, Essays, FA1, fascism, fascist donor networks, GOP, GOP is fascist, ICE, Joe Biden, Josh Hawley, Kamala Harris, legal coup, Mike Pence, militias, Mistah Kurtz He Dead, MP6, nativism, News, Opinion, Politics, Proud Boys, QAnon, Republican Party, SCOTUS coup, Second American Civil War, SuperPAC, Tea Party, Three Percenter militia, Tom Cotton, Trump, Tucker Carlson, Twelfth Amendment, white nationalism

Editor’s note: it’s been an… interesting few days since I published my last article, to say the least. Although I’ve spent about as much time as you probably have watching the news in a mixture of horror and fascination, I have managed to drop a couple of smaller posts and personal updates on Facebook – which I’ve linked here in this note. I’m still working on the latest episode of No Fugazi but as you’ll see below, something rather big has come up that might change what my co-host Nick and I are going to talk about during our next show.

I’m Not Saying I’m Hoping, But…

Well, this is awkward.

As I write this article, swine emperor Trump is apparently lying deathly ill with coronavirus at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The disinformation is flying fast and furious on social media today, but I think it’s objectively safe to say that Trump is fighting for his life. To opine that the outcome of this event will have a tremendous effect on not only my writing, but the election and the upcoming fascist coup I’ve been chronicling would be an understatement on par with suggesting the Titanic “had a little trouble with some ice.”

Unfortunately this leaves me with only two options and neither of them is a perfect solution to the obvious problem that no matter how good an analyst I am, I cannot actually predict the future. I can either take a few days off and see if Trump survives this, or is even in any condition to inspire a fascist coup. Or I can keep writing as if Trump will recover, the election won’t be delayed and if Biden looks like he’s winning, the fascist coup is still on – both inside and outside of American courtrooms.

Mathematically, I should probably assume Trump is going to survive this; but my gut instincts are telling me that he either won’t, or that even if he does the shortened timeline is going to make it impossible for him to enact the nasty fascist takeover plan I detailed in a recent article called Stasis: Surviving the Pork Reich With A Cassandra Complex:

Naturally there is a very obvious reason why the Kelpto Kaiser is destroying the United States Postal Service right before an election that will likely be decided by mail in ballots due to the coronavirus, but as far as I can tell that’s really only the top layer of this filthy fascist onion. There is also a reason Trump is working to de-legitimize mail in voting in general and an election he hasn’t even lost yet. There is a reason someone in the Trump administration is working to popularize a reactionary fascist cult that is totally loyal to Trump and believes his political enemies are baby murdering satanist pedophiles who must be stopped from seizing control of Trump’s America at all costs. There’s a reason the Trump administration has worked to build ties with violent murderpigs, the immigration gestapo and far right militia or paramilitary brownshirt groups. There’s a reason right wing intellectuals, evangelical leaders and even members of the Trump administration keep painting this upcoming election in terms of a struggle for survival, or even a second Civil War. Finally, there is of course a horrifying reason that Trump keeps telling all of these people “you know what to do” at his whackjob fascist political rallies. I don’t have a crystal ball, but taking Trump both literally and seriously this is what I think he means to do:

Donald Trump and the Republican Party at large are going to, or perhaps more accurately have already effectively rigged the election. That’s why Trump is trying to intimidate (primarily) Democrat minority voters before a single ballot is even cast, that’s why sixteen million and seven hundred thousand voters (mostly Democrats) are in the process of being purged from the voting rolls, and that’s why Trump is crippling the Post Office ahead of the what might be the first election dependent on mail in ballots.

If even despite sitting on the scale like a fat elephant, Trump is unable to win the election outright, the administration and the Republican Party will spring into action to challenge and disqualify enough ballots (which will be entirely folks who’ve voted Democrat this time) to give Trump the win. This historically unprecedented number of challenges will likely be supported by astroturfed pressure groups much the same as the Bush-era “Brooks Brothers Riot” although you can bet they’ll be better armed and more explicitly reactionary. Finally, the Party will rely on a judiciary hand-picked by Herr Donald and the Federalist Society to apply the very barest veneer of legality to Trump’s win; in other words, it’ll be a judicial coup just like George W. Bush’s first “win” back in 2000.

If Trump ultimately cannot “win” the election by some combination of voter suppression and judicial coup, he will simply refuse to leave the office and call for a fascist uprising that will be explicitly framed as a counter-coup against the rightful “winner” and President, Donald Trump. Although it is ultimately impossible for me to predict the actions of perhaps millions of people in response to events that haven’t happened yet, I believe the principle groups involved would theoretically be Department of Homeland Security and especially ICE personnel, sympathetic local governments in areas dominated by right wing politics, sympathetic members of the far right Constitutional Sheriff’s movement, American law enforcement acting in open rebellion against regional governments if necessary, paramilitaries and right wing militias such as the Three Percenter movement, brownshirt groups like the Proud Boys, longstanding white supremacist, white nationalist and neo-confederate groups, vast reactionary portions of the American “conspiracy community” such as the regular audience cultivated by folks like Alex Jones, locally formed far-right posses such as those organized to stop the fake “busloads of antifa soldiers coming to your town” propaganda panic, some portion of the pro-Second Civil War US “Boogaloo” movement, perhaps even folks who envision themselves as being part of a biker gang, and of course the President’s astroturfed reactionary cult, Q-Anon. Ultimately, I believe the only logical purpose for assembling the coalition of violent, unhinged reactionaries and autocratic murderpig tyrants Downmaket Mussolini and his administration have actively cultivated is to at least threaten to commit violent repression against your political opponents and I believe that if this were any country other than America that fact would be self-apparent to most observers, but we’re still very much living in a “can’t happen here” understanding of American history and politics.

So where does that leave us if Trump is either stone dead, or too weak to contest an election (that again, will almost certainly go on as planned) by any means; legal, quasi-legal or by reactionary terrorist force?

If He Happens To Croak

Well for starters this is unquestionably good news for people who aren’t fascists, are being targeted by a fascist president, or aren’t particularly interested in kicking out the few remaining planks of America’s sham democracy in favor of an open fascist dictatorship. At this point I’m utterly certain that Mike Pence is not winning a Presidential election in America, ever. With roughly a month to go before ballot day, I additionally don’t see how the fascists inside the Republican Party can recover in time to steal the election; even with Barr’s high-priced pack of lawyers working on disqualifying millions of mail-in voters who happen to vote Democrat. Even more importantly, the fact that Trump has surrounded himself with wholly unlikable nazi ghouls and mewling yes men, at least suggests to me that starting a bunch of riots in Democrat cities and then trying to use the 12^th Amendment to send the election to Congress, is probably no longer on the table unless Herr Donald makes a miraculously quick recovery. I’m not naive enough to believe there’s any real upshot to a Biden-Harris presidency, but at least we can presume they intend to continue maintaining a facade of democracy and there likely will be another election – likely being the key word here.

So if Palooka Joe wins, coup over right? Not so fast actually, because like I’ve discussed numerous times on my social media feeds – the simple truth is that you can’t vote fascism away; it is a post-political ideology that survives inside the body politic in much the same way a virus is currently surviving inside Downmarket Mussolini’s carcass. Between the American right’s open embrace of fascist politics, the swine emperor’s active efforts to seed non-elected branches of government with open fascists, nativists or ultra-nationalists and the rise of militant white nationalist street groups, it would be utterly absurd (especially at this late a stage) to believe that the fascist virus in America will simply disappear without Trump himself directing it. Losing the White House will undoubtedly be a blow to the movement but jubilant American observers would do well to remember that the first Civil War began because the folks we might understand today as moderates and liberals actually won an election against the unified forces of reactionary slave power, not because they lost it.

So, can American fascism really survive and continue to thrive without its God Emperor? Well as I hinted above; in the absolute shortest term, I’m not really sure it can – or at least I don’t think the movement is capable of re-orientating itself around a new leader figure in time to retain the White House and or launch a coup this November; although if Trump does survive, riots and unrest closer to January and in response to various legal challenges the Republican Party will undoubtedly make, still seem likely.

American Fascism Will Survive Losing An Election

The formerly popular idea (among lanyards) that the loss of Trump would force a massive shift in the American right away from fascist politics however, seems like a surprisingly obtuse bit of wishful thinking when one examines the available evidence. While the Klepto Kaiser’s (often exaggerated) charisma and lack of filter may have been necessary to bring the white nationalist wing of the American right back to prominence in the first place, what Trump has ultimately taught the GOP is that they no longer have to rely on euphemisms and that employing fascist political techniques is highly effective. He has demonstrated unequivocally that the path to victory for the reactionary right is saying the quiet part out loud, embracing violence against your political enemies, and running on fascist nativism without bothering with the dog-whistles. If it hasn’t already, the larger Republican Party will effectively become Trump whether he lives or dies, and thus continue to provide the political arm and barest hint of credibility American fascism needs to survive in mainstream U.S. politics.

Nor should one reasonably expect that the extremely dangerous militant arm of American fascism is going anywhere either. White nationalist militia groups like the Three Percenters (who significantly pre-date Trump) or the Boogaloo movement boys (who really don’t care who is president so long as they get to kick off the next Civil War,) certainly aren’t going to vanish. Organized fascist “shirt groups” like the Proud Boys probably won’t either, especially now that they’ve managed to rise to national prominence. Trump’s death or Biden’s election won’t magically purge American law enforcement of its alarming neonazi problem, and it’s not going to suddenly de-radcialize the gestapo muderpigs in I.C.E. Even the hyper-conspiratorial nature of Trump’s fascist cult of personality, QAnon, suggests that it could likely morph to move on without the Klepto Kaiser if that’s the direction the fascist project in America ultimately takes.

Finally of course, because Trump is ultimately a symptom and not the cause of American fascism, the conditions that lead to the rise of the modern fascist movements sweeping across much of the Pig Empire certainly are not dependent on the swine emperor’s continued existence as President of the United States. Does anyone reading this seriously think Fox News is going to give up on mainstreaming fascism if Trump actually buys the farm, for example? Yeah, me neither. These factors are also not going away on their own and they represent quite an extensive obstacle for democratic forces in the so-called West, as I detailed in a 2019 Media Madness essay entitled Active Measures:

Before we can plot a course to the future, it is important to be completely honest with ourselves about where we stand today across the Pig Empire. We are observing the terrifying global rise of an Americanized brand of modern fascism that has been facilitated by decades, if not centuries of reactionary ideas, policies and abuses promoted by elite capital, the mainstream media establishment and the Western ruling class.

In the United States, this movement has taken the form of an unholy alliance between reactionary billionaire families, Wall Street criminals, lobbyists, the fossil fuel industry, wealthy Christian fundamentalists, the Republican Party, right wing media, opportunistic political grifters, hatemongers and various nationalist street gang style organizations. U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration are at once both a natural byproduct of this reactionary fascist movement and also a catalyst for a transformative shift from poorly concealed hyper-capitalist police states posing as liberal democracies, to overt fascist oligarchies here in the West.

Our society has largely stood by as our corrupt institutions, unenforceable political norms and compromised regulatory bodies have fallen to the reactionary right one by one, in country after country throughout the entire Pig Empire. Finally, even as you read this significant if not overwhelming portions of our ruling aristocracy, mainstream media and corporate class are happily punching left and silencing dissent while openly collaborating with and normalizing fascists for personal gain.

I am not a fortune teller and nobody can actually predict the future, but it sure seems to me like even the sudden death of Trump would still leave all the ingredients for a slightly re-branded American fascist movement just waiting around for the right reactionary leader figure to scoop them up and make a run at absolute power. A Biden-Harris election would then almost certainly result in the formation of a well-funded, highly publicized, and politically supported anti-Democrat astroturf protest movement along the lines of the American Tea Party, but more explicitly conspiratorial, openly fascist and gleefully violent. Naturally, this would then be followed by a revived assault on electoral politics by this “new” American fascist movement, its next leader, and the already openly radicalized Republican Party in 2022, and 2024.