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This is coming off the top of my head, but I think there are some useful analogies to be found here.

Fascist Italy: This is the Old Guard Republican Establishment. With the ‘Southern Strategy’ and playing directly to disaffected racist voters they built the new Fascism believing that the dominate position would always be theirs, dreaming of a great Empire that would never materialize. Now they find themselves the powerless junior partner, locked out of their own systems and suffering at the system that they created.

Nazi Germany: This is Trump and his death-cultist, poisoned by the Flavor-Aide and devoted to the one man, the one leader, that is leading them to destruction. Trump seized the machine built by the Establishment and made it serve himself and only himself. Trump and his cult are the driving force of the conflict and they will never stop believing their own deluded lies and myths.

Austria: Remember that Austria was an independent Republic that was ‘annexed’ by Nazi Germany, well these are the Evangelicals. They share a language and a culture with the Trumpists at their side but had until the death-cult ‘annexed’ remained their own force in Conservative American Politics. However, after enthusiastically welcoming the new strong man across their borders they have lost all that independence. Look to that new survey that reports more Republicans trust Trump to tell them the truth than their own pastors. They are now indistinguishable from the Trumpists.

Romania and the minor Axis Powers: These are the wealthy seeking their tax cuts, the businesses looking to escape any and every regulation that impedes even a single penny to their coffers, and the gun-right enthusiasts. They have signed the Axis pact; they have supplied the men and material for the invasions and conquest but now see that they have lashed themselves to a foundering ship. They desperately want to be saved from the consequences of their own actions but are wholly occupied by the death-cult and there is no escape. Their fate, deservedly so, is tied to the cult’s.

Finland: These are the ‘Anti-anti-Trumps’. For these there is no greater enemy than ‘liberals.’ And like Finland they’ll give resources and co-ordinate attacks against the shared ‘enemy’ with the Trumpists all while tutting the co-belligerents war crimes, genocide, and racism. I also suspect that they will also flip the moment their own survival is imperiled turning on those that had just moments before been defending.

Yesterday, the latest set of indictments were charged against Donald Trump, these related to his direct assault on American Democracy and the attempt to overthrow the election.

There are those who hope, futilely I believe, that this will finally break ‘the fever.’ There is no fever. There is no madness gripping the Modern Republican Party from which sanity can be restored. This GOP is the GOP that is logical and inevitable result of decades of committed action. The party Trump usurped was once crafted to believe the big lies, to reject reality, and one motivated by hate, primed for a man such as Trump to come and take it away from the monied interests who foolishly believed such a monster would remain forever in their control.

So, one more set of charges, one more barrage of criminality, one more assault on democracy will matter not at all to a base cultivated to reject reality for their own twisted and hateful fantasies.

Within the GOP primary I suspect Trump numbers will move no more than the usual amount dictated by statistical noise. Old School Republican Pols such as Mike Murphy will continue to cling to their own delusions of a weakening Trump and the spineless will continue to supplicate themselves for breadcrumbs of power from this poisonous party.

The salvation of this nation, this democratic experiment, lies outside of the Republican Party. The GOP must be defeated everywhere and at every level of political power. Not just in the next election or the one after that but for the next twenty years. Saving America is a generational project and only a new generation of Republicans might be trusted with any power at all.

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It is hardly shocking, surprising, or even unanticipated but thoroughly unprecedented that the former president and leading Republican candidate for that office has been charged with 37 serious criminal felonies.

Nor it is it unexpected that scrums of Republican pols flock like birds to his defense. Oh, there are a few, very few, willing to mouth some platitudes that these charges are serious, but their protestations are the elaborations of bad liars.

There are voices speaking out from beyond the party in hopes that this time the fever will break that this time things will be different. They insist that these are serious charges, that the evidence is too solid, the facts too damning for the former guy’s support to remain intact. And in my head a tiny voice from a fantastic film answers them.

The Republican party, the one built over decades of poisonous politics, insisting that anything to their left was complete and utter communism, the party that invited, welcomed, and nurtured bigots under the delusion that they could safely harvest their votes with ever actually granting them power, has been utterly captured by these illiberal anti-democratic forces and I do not see that ending for a decade.

Today Trump is to be arraigned but with only the most modest of legal actions this will be dragged out beyond the election. There will be no trial before November of next year unless Trump is his unmatched idiocy allows it. The future of our nation and the world’s rational order is at stake. It is up to us to save it.

Though it is more than a year in the future the next presidential contest will be upon us fast and horrid.

THE PRIMARIES

On the Democratic side, barring any extraordinary exogenous event, such as a serious health event, Joe Biden will be the nominee. Robert F Kennedy jr., despite a name of Democratic royalty, will be a gadfly and I fully expect that vaccine denying idiot to be tossed aside and not present any serious threat.

For the Republicans things are much dicer, dangerous, and chaotic.

No declared and soon to be declared candidate has shown the chop, the skill, and the willingness to be a ‘Trump killer’ if such a thing is possible within the poisonous voter base the GOP has built over the last 30 years. So, there will a fight across the primaries, and I suspect right on to the convention floor, unless Trump simply wins the primary contest right out. If Trump wins the delegates count in the primary the GOP will stay true to their runny, warm jello spines and supplicate themselves again the macaroni Mussolini. IF Trump does not win the primaries, then he will challenge each and every loss as stolen, turning to the courts and the local party apparatus, the latter which he has gained a firm hand on, to take the delegates anyway.

Should Trump fail to steal the delegates in the courts or in the local committees, then the floor fight will start, and it will not be a calm, considered conflict, but a vicious brawl waged with Trump’s well-known restraint.

Should he win that fight he will go into the election with the GOP fractured, a weakened but not a defeated candidate.

Should he lose that fight, I do not think, as many do, that he will run as a third-party pick, but rather he will stand on the side and throw figurative eggs at the GOP candidate. Pettiness and vengeance are much more powerful emotions for Trump than any form of reason. This alternate future I think would give Biden his best chance for a clean and easy victory.

Th worst outcome for Biden, the nation, and democracy would be for Trump to clearly win the primary contests, putting him in the strongest position to win.

Remember, while Biden racked up millions more votes than Trump in 2020, he actually won by only 40 or 50 thousand votes. 2024 could go to Trump with Biden having an even larger popular vote win.

I do not think the court cases, or the criminal charges will seriously damage Trump with the GOP base. These events only ‘prove’ that the liberal system is out to get him, further enhancing the ‘persecuted’ complex of the modern GOP. Nor will he be in jail, even if convicted, he will be free on appeal, as all rich people are, and that appeal process will turn slowly, leaving him free to chase that election.

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For the first time in American History a grand jury has indicted a former president of the nation on criminal charges. The exact nature of those charges are still unknown as the disclosure will occur at the defendant’s arraignment and everything said about those charges, their strengths or weaknesses is mere speculation. But hey, there are clicks to harvest and commercial airtime to sell so the speculation is not going to stop.

Of course, all of this is so utterly predicable that the most fraudulent telephone psychic of the 80s or 90s would have foretold its coming. Trump, a man who idolized and admired the organized crimes goons of his city, who famously stiffed nearly everyone single person he ever owed money to, and who envisioned himself, despite his soft doughy nature, as a hard man of cruelty, was always at some point exceed his limited intellectual capacity and finally violate the law in a manner that he would not be able to bribe, buy, or dodge his way out of. That was a predictable as the law of gravity.

And yet, notwithstanding all that the Republican Party, lashed themselves to his fate and, depending on your point of view, either revealed their utter hypocrisy or shredded their final and weakly held principles as the party of ‘individual responsibility’ and devoted their time and treasure to this small, weak, and stupid man’s defense.

Having spent the previous decades chasing away anyone with a modicum of decency towards their fellow person while making every effort to enrichen the wealthy the elites and powerbrokers of the GOP transformed their once proud vehicle into a clown car and then handed the wheel over to the biggest clown of all.

Now devoid of principles save the authoritarian ‘my way!’ they GOP as shocked and terrified to discover that the clown car has ended up into the police station and there is little chance to escape the terrible, inevitable, and wholly foreseeable fallout of their self-destruction. They fervently pray that a conviction or a Big Mac will remove the orange clown from their care, but even if that were to come to pass it would change very little. The army of clowns that they had spent decades building, fooling themselves that it obeyed their commands, has taken control and will remain there for at least another decade.