Pretty much what we were expecting
We all heard pundits talk about how Trump was going to magically postpone the election. When that didn’t happen, they predicted that Trump would magically rig the election. When that didn’t happen, they predicted that the courts would magically hand Trump the election. When that didn’t happen, they predicted Trump would somehow just remain in office forever anyway.
By now it’s clear that these pundits were playing us. They simply fed us the scariest doomsday scenario they could think of, so we’d be scared into paying attention to them. They even tried to legitimize themselves by pointing out that they were willing to tell us what we didn’t want to hear. And they gambled that by the time none of these things happened, we’d be too relieved to realize that we’d been played.
I only bring this up now because it’s remarkable not only how none of those cartoonish doomsday scenarios happened, but also how things are pretty much what we were expecting. Here we are with an exceedingly popular Joe Biden putting things back together in swift fashion, even as Trump’s remaining supporters whine and cry like babies, and even as we sit around waiting to see which of Trump and his henchmen gets arrested first.
Roger Stone’s direct co-conspirators in the Capitol attack have now been charged with felony conspiracy, paving the way for Stone to be charged with conspiracy as well. Steve Bannon is also on the verge of new criminal charges. We knew that if Trump lost, these kinds of career criminals would commit more crimes, get caught, and finally go down now that Trump isn’t in power to bail them out.
We didn’t know about Matt Gaetz and his disturbing new scandal, but once he openly threatened the family of a congressional witness a couple years back, we figured he was doing far worse behind the scenes, and it would take him down once Trump was gone. And of course Trump himself is being squeezed six ways to Sunday by New York criminal prosecutors. He’s just sitting like a grape, trying to convince himself that his arrest isn’t coming, and falling apart.
If you were paying attention to what was really going on in the second half of 2020, if you remained rational and level headed instead of succumbing to doomsday hype, if you frankly kept up with Palmer Report, then you knew that things would end up looking pretty much like what they now look like. It’s not all wine and roses. We still face serious challenges. But the landscape here in 2021 is pretty much what we were expecting.
