Personally, I think there's reason to be worried but ultimately Trump will back down. To do the kind of thing he's looking to pull off he needs total control over people who have lots of guns and the political cover to use them when you've lost. You can see the personal moves at the Department of Defense as his attempt to solidify his hold over the military but having sycophants in leadership positions doesn't mean that the soldiers will follow orders. There's always going to be a contingent of soldiers who will happily go along with establishing a dictatorship, but whether there's enough to go along with Trump is something I'm rather doubtful of.
Trump's political cover is also rapidly evaporating. It's one thing for Congressional Republicans to cast aspersions on the validity of our elections, that's just what they do, all the time. It's another thing entirely for them to put themselves in harms way for the sake of a man who clearly lost and will not pay the favor back in anyway. As far as thatgoes, Mitch McConnell did not get to where he is by sacrificing himself on the altars of lost causes.
Even so, Trump is in the best possible position a losing president can be in. He's walking out of office with more votes than any Republican president has ever received, he took 93% of the party vote, and made gains with every minority group. In other words, Trump is in a position to retain near total control over the Republican party for years to come, if he bothered to realize it. But the man is so obsessively focused on his own ego that he can't see the forest for the trees. All he cares about is his image, the projection that he is a winner. He doesn't know how to translate or leverage influence into actual power, he just wants to look good on TV. Dude has the once-in-a-lifetime chance to have every future Republican candidate come crawling on their hands and knees for his favor but he's going to throw it all away because he won't be in the White House anymore. He's such a petty asshole he can't recognize the power that's right in front of him.
Per usual, Trump sucking all the oxygen out of the room distracts us from talking about some thing that's actually interesting. In this case, it's how, in a pandemic, depression levels of unemployment, and the most unpopular president in history, the Democrats came out of election night in a worse position than they started.
Yes, winning the presidency is good, no argument there. But the focus on headline races obscures how hollow the victory really is.
If every thing goes well, the Senate might be a 50-50 tie, but the party lost seats in the House and failed to take any state legislators. That last one is especially critical, arguably the most important elections on the ballot. The reason is that now that we've had a Census, it's time to redraw the district maps that make up the House of Representative and state legislature districts. So now we're in the position of having to fight uphill in gerrymandered districts to knock off well funded incumbents with a near nonexistent bench of exciting challengers.
This lack of a bench makes winning the presidency near useless. It doesn't matter if you're chief executive if you're effectively crippled in implementing your agenda.
Naturally, there are questions over how Democrats could screw up such a layup of an election, again, and to the surprise of no one, they've decided that the party has just moved too far to the left. Which, honestly is too funny. Blaming Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and Defund the Police as the rocks which the blue wave broke against is classic liberal behavior, even though all were things that Biden and most House Democrats explicitly renounced. Still, the argument goes, the mere existence of these policy positions was enough to sink moderates prospects and that is why any further progressive agenda needs to be heavily reigned in.
What must never be questioned is the message that centrists candidates are running on. We must always assume that running candidates on oil and gas platforms with no investment in renewable energy during a rapidly worsening climate crisis has no downsides. We must also assume that backing police over social protests over their rampant abuses will also lead to nothing but good outcomes. It's good politics to tell your constituents that want you to make the world a better place that their desires are stupid and unachievable.
There should be alarm bells going off in Democratic circles right now. They barely scraped a win against the worst president we've ever had and lost ground in all the other areas of government that matter. They're very obviously running out of ideas and strategies to remain an effective political force who can enact policies at any level of government.
To close on a positive note, the one good thing to come out of the Biden candidacy is that it is impossible to form a cult of personality around him. The dude is charming enough, but there's a reason he's always been passed over in all his other presidential bids. Hell, even this time he couldn't even manage to get people behind him on his own; it was only when Obama and the rest of the Democratic political machine intervened to clear out all the other centrist candidates so they wouldn't split the vote for Biden. The absence of any popular movement around Biden means that his victory can't be chalked up to anything to do with the man himself.
Biden only has his presidency because voters organized themselves and busted their ass to churn out communities to the polls to line up behind his sorry ass. If popular movements can organize effectively enough to get a man nobody really likes elected, then we can do the same for things that are actually worth a shit. There's a reason politicians like Obama see the ideal body politic as one who shows up on election days but spends the rest of the time disconnected gossiping over brunch- things are so much easier when you don't have to deal with the rabble getting upset over their lot in life.
Keep getting in trouble, keep being a nuisance, keep making their lives hell. It's the only way any of us will get anything to help us get by, let alone thrive.
