Never tell me the odds
“Never tell me the odds.” It’s a classic line from Han Solo in Star Wars, which is of course fictional. But given that we’re now up against a decrepit villain who wants to be Emperor, maybe it’s not so fictional. In any case, the point of the line is that when you’re trying to fight and win in a tough situation, there’s no point in obsessing over your odds on paper. And I think it really applies to the fight we’re now in.
We’ve been on a bizarre, cruel, and hard to believe roller coaster over the past month. First we lost the election (and Congress) in a shockingly tragic twist. Then the media (our supposed allies in the “free press”) started gleefully caving to Trump, and it looked like there was nothing left for us to do but keep resisting until the bitter end. Survive? Perhaps. Win? Heh. Win what?
But then something happened. Donald Trump, with his newly minted election victory and complicit Republican Senate and even more complicit mainstream media, did something unbelievably dumb. He nominated Matt Gaetz for Attorney General and the Fox News guy for Secretary of Defense. As I said, I’m out of the prediction business for awhile. But as soon as these nominations happened, my first thought was “We just might be back in business.”
There were only a handful of names in the world that the Senate was going to have any chance of rejecting, and by golly, Trump went straight for those names. Some people think he was “testing the limits of his power.” I think he was just being senile and picking people from TV and from his own rallies simply because he could still remember they existed. Either way, Trump really, really blew it.
Not only does Trump now have egg all over his face for the failed Gaetz nomination and the failing Hegseth nomination, it’s already shifted the balance of power. The Senate was all set to eagerly rubber stamp Trump’s nominees, no matter how corrupt they might be, so long as they weren’t cartoonishly absurd. But because Trump went for the cartoonishly absurd and forced the Senate to fight back, the Senate has now decided it likes retaining its power. Sure, Republican Senators are all as corrupt as Trump is. But they have their own corrupt agenda. And Trump just signaled to them that he’s so thoroughly not up for the job, they might as well just steamroll him and do whatever they want.
The Republican Senate is not our friend, never was, never will be. But we’ll deal with them later. For now they’re doing us a favor by weakening Trump right out of the gate. What did Trump want his agenda to be right now? Garnering public support for deporting everyone who isn’t white and then killing NATO? So much for that. Instead Trump’s entire agenda has been bogged down by the embarrassing manner in which he’s having to play defense for his failing cabinet nominees.
And so Trump is now set to limp into office, unpopular, unpowerful, with no momentum for his agenda and no political muscle behind his presidency. Trump is clearly surrounded by buffoons. They either don’t have any understanding of how politics works, or are unable to convince Trump to sign off on moves that make any political sense. He’s got the unelected and mentally incompetent owner of Twitter trying to run the presidency for him, in a marriage that’ll last about as long as two malignant narcissists can ever stand to work together. And Trump has a Vice President-elect who’s already been pushed fully out of the inner circle who’s clearly just waiting for Trump to keel over from his obvious health problems. Which, by the way, we don’t want to happen too soon. The longer a stubbornly senile Trump is in office doing things like nominating people from Fox News, the harder it’ll be for anyone around Trump to use Trump’s presidency to make any of their corrupt agenda happen.
The day after the election I wrote that we were in hell. We’re still there. This is still going to be a dark battle, and not a quick one. But one month into it and Trump is now somehow also in hell. He’s incompetently created such a nightmare for himself that the massive political muscle he had a month ago is already severely atrophied. Trump is already on defense, and there’s already a reek of desperation and failure hanging over him. The media and the Republican Congress tried to give Trump a total free pass right out of the gate, and he still blew it.
So yes, we’re in a much, much better situation now than we were a month ago. That’s what happens when your opponent grabs the reins and then starts self destructing. The fact that the Republican Senate is rejecting Trump’s nominees is a big deal. It means they’re still afraid of us. They’re afraid of what we’ll do to them in the midterms. If they thought it was all over for us, they’d just be going along with whatever Trump wanted. The Republicans clearly think we’re still a fighting force.
I don’t know what winning looks like anymore, but I do know that this is a real fight. I do know that the odds of us succeeding in our goal to save our democracy have gone way up from where they were a month ago. Are the odds still against us? Of course. But hey, we’re still in this fight. If we keep at it, our odds just might continue improving.
