Response to Simply General Defiance

(See: Just Above Sunset : Simply General Defiance)

This new muting-the-microphones debate rule doesn’t really seem like enough to stymie Trump’s plan to keep Biden from making sense, since it only applies to the first two minutes of each 15-minute segment, the rest of which will be a free-for-all format.

I’m not looking forward to the debate, assuming it even happens, but if the Trump people want to make it all foreign policy, I’d be fine with that. In fact, neither side talks much about Trump’s trashy foreign policy, and neither does anyone else, but I think the Democrats should welcome the opportunity to remind America how Trump has weakened the country’s position in the world.

And even talking about Hunter could be fine, if Biden does it right:

“Assuming the New York Post article is NOT a plant by the Russians — although all indications seem to point to the fact that it IS — all it would prove, at worst, is that some guy who works for Burisma had my son introduce me to him, not that I helped the company in any way. So what would be the big deal in that? But I never DID meet with the guy, so that email is phony and meaningless — especially compared, for example, to the attempts of the president and his personal so-called 'lawyer', trying to fabricate all these weird stories about me and my family in Ukraine, just to cover up for the crimes of HIS friends in Russia, and probably to detract attention from the hundreds of thousands of Americans who died because he decided this pandemic was no big deal and not worth worrying about."

But there's something I've noticed in the last few days. I think Trump may be giving up.

He seems to be attempting a Hail Mary, hoping that, if he has to lose — something he seems to finally realize he's doing — he’ll do it without a pivot, and on his own terms.

He may even be giving up on his belief that he can manufacture reality, and even truth itself, by simply repeating his fake version until the fact-checkers tire of correcting him. He may secretly be discovering that his attempt to get all of America to accept his view that Covid-19 is just another insignificant fact of American life, seems no longer to be working.

Even those in his base who always knew he was a jerk but backed him anyway seem to be abandoning him, once they came to realize that more Americans are dying of this virus than die in all of our wars. That, they might finally be realizing, can't be good, no matter how many conservative judges we get.

But what the fuck (his words, not mine), rather than walk everything back (it’s too late for that anyway), he may just have decided to end his political career by pretending it was all just one big stand-up routine. That seems to have been the part of being president he enjoyed the most anyway.

Assuming he’s accepting that he’ll probably lose, I hope he’s right, but only if my side gets to keep the House and gets to pick up, at the very least, half of the Senate.

Anything less than that and we may find ourselves facing not just the end of one wide-awake nightmare, but also the beginning of another.