{"id":25874,"date":"2021-02-04T07:54:06","date_gmt":"2021-02-04T07:54:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=158305"},"modified":"2021-02-04T07:54:06","modified_gmt":"2021-02-04T07:54:06","slug":"self-perpetuating-hubris-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/02\/04\/self-perpetuating-hubris-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Self-Perpetuating Hubris"},"content":{"rendered":"

February 4, 2021<\/span>by<\/span> Paul Gilk<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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For a while after January 6, I thought that high-end Republicans would choose to convict the about-to-be impeached Donald Trump. Just getting rid of him politically. Preventing him from ever again exercising his adolescent buffoonery in big league politics. The sheer shock of January 6 blew off\u2014temporarily\u2014a lot of ideological fog and Machiavellian smoke. But the fog and smoke weren\u2019t gone for long. Or long enough.<\/p>\n

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A reconsideration has obviously been made. The forty-five Republican votes in the Senate, calling the impeachment unconstitutional, tells you all you need to know about that. Donald the rogue elephant, with his bellowing gift of agitating gab\u2014gopgab, you might say, garnished with some nasty nouveau fascist visceral hatred\u2014has the obvious capacity to create his own political party. The Tea Party or T-Party come into Foxscreen TV Breitbart neo-reality. Ready for a trial cruise by 2022. Fully up to demolition derby speed by 2024.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Trump Party.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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To, in principle, prevent Donald J. Trump t-boning the Republican Party in a massive intersecting election-year wreckage, the Republican brainsters are choosing to keep Trump in the herd, on the road, because a potential short-term second-term Trump disaster might be easier to manage and recover from than a smoldering political train wreck that would make the Republican Party a junkyard relic in the Red-state rust belt.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Therefore the United States Senate will not convict Donald Trump or bar him from future office. Therefore the Republican Party\u2014the high-end Republican brainsters high on Koch\u2014will make the fatal error of legitimizing, for 2022 and 2024, an outright stab at the Rush Limbaughization of America. Such a strategy (if we can call it that) cannot, in the end, win. But it can, in the indeterminate short-term, deliver a hell of a lot of damage and inflict a hell of a lot of pain. The thing almost feels fated by the ethical inertia of self-perpetuating hubris.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s entirely possible that we\u2019ll see Kamala Harris versus Donald Trump in 2024. And that\u2014with a Harris victory\u2014could ignite January 6 all over again, only on a much larger scale. Or (life is not inevitably predictable) the Donald might mellow out, attend Kamala\u2019s inauguration, and give her a modest kiss on her dark-skinned presidential cheek.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n

This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

February 4, 2021by Paul Gilk For a while after January 6, I thought that high-end Republicans would choose to convict the about-to-be impeached Donald Trump. Just getting rid\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1752,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25874"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1752"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25874"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25874\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25875,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25874\/revisions\/25875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}