It would seem that nature, the fates, or God, which force is most prominent in your belief system, has taken a hand in springing an October Surprise into our Presidential election season by infecting President Trump with COVID-19.

It is very tempting to mock and jeer at this news.

Trump’s willful mismanagement of the crisis has left tens of thousands of American needlessly dead. While possessing just about 4% of the world’s population the United States account for about 20% of the pandemic’s death total.

Trump cruelty to those who he sees as his enemies invites other to retaliate with their own cruelty.

His mocking of others with afflictions makes the desire to mock his own nearly irresistible.

I cannot speak for other but for myself I am not Trump and I am a better person than he. I will not mock him. I will not delight in his misery. I will not wish for him a slow painful and terrifying death no matter how poetically ironic it would prove to be.

I will confess to a dark delight that I would love to see Trump survive and then endure a crushing defeat delivered by Team Biden.

I would love to see Biden’s electoral team roll that ‘crit’ and crush the GOP with 400 electoral vote victory. Which according to the projections from the Washington Post’s data nerds is about a 10% chance, making it more likely than a natural ‘crit’ in D&D.

I would love to see a Democratic Tide so high that it washes away Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnel, however unlikely such an outcome is. Only through such a crushing defeat could the GOP be forced to rebuild itself as the sort of respectable conservative party that would be immune to future Trumps and I want Trump to live to see that happen.

The New York Times has obtained tax returns for Donald Trump covering a number of years exposing his lies, both as a ‘businessman’ and as a citizen. For many the bombshell fact will be that for many years Trump paid zero, nothing at all, in Federal Income taxes and in fact at one point claimed a tax credit, that is not a deduction that reduced his obligation but a credit where the US Federal Government paid him nearly 73 million dollars, a credit that was quite possibly fraudulent and if the IRS audit, yes he actually is under an audit for this particular credit, finds he abused the system to claim this credit then he could, on this one point alone, owe more than 100 million in taxes and fines.

In addition to this, the absurd sums deducted as business expenses, such as 70,000 dollars in haircuts (Do you remember GOP outrage at President Clinton’s $200 haircut?) and the possibly illegal nearly $800,000 ‘consulting fees’ paid to his daughter Ivanka, and the 400 Million dollars in debt coming due between now and 2024, that is during his second term should he pull off another electoral college victory, we need to remember his other financial shenanigans, the proven fraud of his non-profit foundation which the Trump’s used as a shell to hide money and their own personal piggy bank, and the dubious and secretive financial dealing with foreign powers.

But these frauds and tax schemes of Trump’s is not the larger scandal.

The larger, structural scandal is that so much of what Trump does is standard operating procedure for the massively wealthy. Wealth has captured the regulatory state and while the GOP slashes and burns their way through environmental regulations in the name of business and profit the wealthy dive through loops holes escaping what little tax burden the law does require of them. Until Trump leaped into the hot glare of presidential politics much of this, certainly his non-profit foundation scams, would have escape justice but he is far from the only one.

Should the Democratic Party regain the levers of power they should use this outrage to launch a new era of accountability for the wealthy and make false the bragging of one Leona Helmsley that, ‘We don’t pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes.’

First off, there is nothing the Democrats can do to stop the GOP senate from filling RBG’s seat with whoever they want. There’s no parliamentary rule or maneuverer open to them and without the support of 3 or 4 GOP senators, the number varies by the timing of the vote and if Mark Kelly wins because he would not wait to be seated with the new Senate, the chair is lost to them. No petition, no calls, no letters, can stop this only the GOP and the prize is too great for them to pass. They will do this, and impact will last 30 or 40 years.

The GOP has ceased using legislation, aside from reconciliation to enact tax cuts, to advance their agenda but instead have more and more become reliant upon the courts to strike down laws and regulations that they wish to see done away with. A prime example of this is the Voting Rights Act. The VRA, originally passed in 1965, was most recently reauthorized in full in 2013 but a 77-19 vote with only 2 GOP Senator voting against it but when the Supreme Court removed key provision the GOP refused to move or even suggest legislative fixes. Unable to repeal the ACA in the legislature they are currently suing to have the Court throw the law out. The foundation of this strategy is conservative jurists with lifetime appointments face no political blowback or cost for enacting conservative agendas. Occasional losses pf the house, Senate, or White House are acceptable trade-offs for this long-term power. It is a pragmatic powerplay and no charge of hypocrisy will stop it. The GOP has been playing the field while saying ‘find a rule to stop me.’

Should the Democrats take back the Senate and the White House there will be pressure to play the same game and at that moment GOP pearls will be clutched, fainting salts administered, and cries ‘I’m shocked, shocked! To Find power politics being played here!’ The GOP will insist with convoluted logic and a deep sudden dread of the future, along with a rediscovered desire to slash spending, that the Democratic Party must adhere to traditions and norms and not make any bold plays to expand their power.

These must be ignored.

What is good for the goose is good for the gander and the Democratic party must not allow itself to become mired in the GOP’s never-ending version of Calvin-ball. Once one side has traded in plastic bats and whiffle balls for Louisville Sluggers and regulation baseballs then it is political malpractice to not move fully to the new contested field.

Recently I was exposed to the theory that Joe Biden in his presidential ambitions is likely to, after winning the White House and serving a brief portion of his term, resign and turn it over to Vice President Harris.

My writer’s brain tried to sus out the detail of how this occurred to Biden and frankly I don’t have a malleable enough imagination to make it credibly work.

Biden has run for president before and in his previous excursions on the political presidential battlefields has been routed. To quote a jape from The Daily Show ‘You don’t need Ukraine to beat Joe Bide, Joe Biden will beat Joe Biden.’ But as they say in the financial commercials past performance doesn’t assure future performance. A reasonable expectation when Biden entered the race was that he was too centrist for the moment and as before would be beaten in the primary.

Given that it is hard to imagine that he launched a grueling campaign not only expecting to win but plotting to give it all away as well. And even if he had joined the fray with that intention his serious early defeats would have given him credible coverage to drop out and let the left have the field. No, I just can’t see him starting the campaign with the intention of winning it and then giving it away.

So, for this theory to hold water he would need to come to this conclusion after the campaign’s start. After South Carolina Joe’s momentum built and the candidacy that had been on life support became the monster that slew the opponents to its left. Now going from victory to victory Biden suddenly decides that he wants to win but give it to the woman who shived him in the first debate? Joe has wanted to be president for some time, he ran back in 1988 what event or turn of chance would prompt him to suddenly decide he didn’t really want it but wanted to win it for someone else?

No, the idea that he came up with this plot after the contest started doesn’t hold water either. Like the idea of reavers piloting ships from planet to planet in the Firefly universe I simply can’t envision the scene where this happens.

The truth of the matter is that Biden, who isn’t for defunding the police, isn’t for Medicare for All, isn’t for eliminating the filibuster, just isn’t that frightening and that to make him frightening one has to invoke stalking horses, Trojan horses, or Manchurian scenarios otherwise he is a fairly garden variety Democrat and compared to the insanity that is the Trump GOP that’s far from frightening.

Ryan Struck of CCN tweeted a quoted from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell:

“After they change the filibuster, they’re going to admit the District as a state. They’re going to admit Puerto Rico as a state. That’s four new Democratic senators in perpetuity. Once they get a hammerlock on the Senate, they’re going to then pack the Supreme Court.”

There is an interesting and unstated foundational premise in McConnell’s argument about the number of senators, that the Republican Party is incapable of persuasion. The voters it has now, its primarily white Christian voting base, is the only one it is capable of attracting.

This is a truth that is universally known but rarely acknowledged. It is the truth the motivates the voter suppression efforts of the party because this is party incapable of attracting new voters to this side. In 2012 the GOPs presidential candidate lost the electoral college with a popular vote share of 47.2 percent while in 2016 it won with a lower share of the vote a mere 46.1 percept of the popular total.

The foundational idea of democracy, direct or representational, is that it is a marketplace of ideas where political actor present and argue for various causes, policies, and ideals and the voters determine those that are place into office or enacted. In theory a part that loses voters adjusts their policies and positions to attract new voter for victory in future cycles and the only way the new states would be Democratic in perpetuity is if the GOP is incapable of adjusting itself to attract new voters in those new states.

There was a time in presidential contests when California was a solidly Republican state it is no more. Things do change and the idea of the any state belong to one party in perpetuity is false but McConnell is telling a truth.

The Republican Party as is it now standing solidly against democratic ideal and processes and confronted in a contest of ideas will lose for the foreseeable future.

Listening to a historian the other day I learned that the GOP’s bleeding of Black votes has been going on for much longer than I had expected. My thoughts were that the GOP had once been the home of the Black vote because of the warm feeling for Lincoln, the End of Slavery, and an aversion to the Democratic Party due to its explicit support of Jim Crow segregationist laws. And that this rough alignment began unraveling with the 1960s and the Civil rights legislation pushed by President Johnson, but this view is only partially correct.

The GOP was the home to the Black vote but the bleeding of that support began with the 1936 election as the Black vote started departing for Roosevelt despite that fact that at that time the Democratic party was strongly associated with southern segregationists. In 1939 the GOP commissioned a report investigation why they were losing the Black vote and what measure were required to regain it. The author, Ralph Bunche, reported that while the Black vote had no illusions about the stronger support with the Democratic party for racist policies the economic benefits of the New Deal were tangible gains for the community and to win the vote back the GOP would need to enact policies that produced tangible benefits and not simply rely on good will and historical associations.  The GOP rejected the findings and continued to lose the Black vote.

The process repeated in the 1960s where one party produced real world change that could be seen and felt and again there was a report and again the action required were rejected. Instead Nixon and GOP sought the vote of the disaffected Democratic whites that opposed the new round of civil right legislation in the ‘Southern Strategy,’ over any meaningful actions and the Black Votes continued to bleed.

2012 the GOP lost to Obama and commissioned a new report, a report that advised actual actions and again the results were rejected and the party embraced an openly racist candidate with Trump. Trump gathered a vote total that was actually less than the 2012’s losing total for the GOP but due to third party defections and strategic fluctuations in voter turnout managed his Electoral College victory.

Three times the GOP has been told by people it has hired what it needs to do to reach out and win more support from Black and other ethnic communities. Three times is had rejected the answers preferring platitudes to actions, messages to meanings, and now it has abandoned all sense of honor, morality, and ethics is it quest for electoral victory.

Trump is not the storm that is battering our political shores. Trump is the storm surge, the destructive water crushing and eroding our norms and shattering the dykes of good governance but he is merely a product of the storm, an emergent property of the cyclone and should he be defeated in November, even if it is by margins so large and unquestionable that we are certain of the result on election night, the storm will not have passed but instead will have presented the false calm of its eye.

Without the benefits of aircraft, satellites and radar an approaching hurricane seems at first like a large but normal storm, there is nothing in the growing winds, darkening clouds, and sheets of rain to foretell the monster that is imminent. For decades the growing reactionary racism, rejections of reality, and insular inbred system of information of the Republican party and its supporting organization have been the building storm. Trump is not a sudden lightning strike that shatters the air and then vanishes he is the product of the building winds, the lowering pressure that pulls the sea from its bed to wash away civilization. While the storm surge deals tremendous damage, it is not the most dangerous part of the hurricane that is the eye wall where the winds are the fastest and can rip tress from their roots and houses from their foundations.

When you pass through the eye wall into the storm’s eye the winds vanish, the skies clear, and the calm can lure you to your death. Because when the other side of the eye brings the storm back it does not build slowly as it did before but rather the winds go from calm to full force in moments, now battered weakened and damaged structures from the opposite direction, shattering weaking building with the sudden force.

Trump defeat will be a moment of clam but Trumpism, the vile, racist approach to American governance will not have vanished. The attacks, spurious and hyperbolic on the new administration will, with their resemblance to GOP behavior during the previous Democratic Administrations, seem like a return to normalcy and like the hurricane’s eye we must not be lulled into compliancy or expect that the worst is over. 2022 and 2024 will be end of the eye and the return to the fight for survival and we must be ready for it. The storm surge will have passed but not the storm.