Strange days
When a judge incorrectly and incoherently ruled yesterday in favor of appointing a special master to oversee the sorting of evidence that had already been sorted, it set off yet another round of defeatist hysteria about how Donald Trump had “won” and was going to “get away with it all.”
But even setting aside the pretty obvious reality that this silly court ruling will be immediately overturned on appeal and won’t actually help Trump at all, there is another aspect to this court battle that is being completely overlooked. Trump isn’t in court because he’s the President of the United States, trying to convince a judge to let him get away with some evil scheme. Trump is in court because he’s a private citizen who is in the process of being put in federal prison for his crimes.
This can’t be stated loudly enough: Trump is completely powerless. For the past year and a half since we triumphantly booted Trump from office, we’ve had to put up with a mainstream media and pundit class who has spent every day trying to convince us that Trump is still somehow in power and has us right where he wants us. When Trump does occasionally surface in public, we’re reminded that he’s a broken, bewildered half-senile loser who’s just waiting to be finished off by the criminal justice system. Then he disappears again, and the media goes right back to trying to brainwash us into believing that this broken loser is somehow all-powerful and will soon be right back in charge of the country.
When we saw Trump very stupidly cash in one of his dwindling number of political favors on something as pointless as a special master ruling that won’t last five minutes, we all should have simply rolled our eyes at just how far Trump has fallen, and chuckled at how addled Trump truly is for thinking that this ruling was somehow his salvation. Instead, large chunks of the people on our side simply panicked and hid under their desks, because they’ve been conditioned to believe that Trump is still President.
For as much as we mock Donald Trump’s pathetic and delusional supporters for pretending that he won the 2020 election and that he’s still secretly President, we’re going to have to address the fact that so many petrified folks on our side have been brainwashed into essentially believing that Trump is still the President. Not only is this bad for activism (you can’t rally yourself to fight and win if you’re convinced you’ve somehow already lost), it’s also pretty obviously mentally unhealthy.
As we head into this political week, which is starting late and in strange fashion, we should all take a deep breath and remind ourselves of where things really stand. Donald Trump lost the election, got booted from office, is in such bad condition his handlers try to keep him hidden, and he’s in court because he’s feebly trying to fend off his inevitable arrival in federal prison. At this point, any other take on Trump is just empty noise.
Meanwhile, even though Trump is completely finished and his life is over, a bunch of mini-Trumps are trying to seize control of Congress in just sixty days. If they win the midterms, there will be literally nothing they can do to keep Trump from spending the rest of his life in prison. Again, Trump is finished. But a Republican Congress would certainly be able to abuse their power to make Americans’ lives a nightmare.
So if you want to panic and fret about something, I urge you not to take the lazy person’s route of panicking and fretting over laughably imaginary ghost stories about Donald Trump’s comeback. Since a Trump comeback is not a real thing, choosing to live in fear of it is just an excuse to not have to do any actual political activism or work. If you want to actually make a difference, the (only) way to do that is to focus entirely on the midterm elections. If you don’t want to see a Republican House or Senate, adopt a Democratic candidate in a competitive race and get to work with fundraising and volunteering. That’s what your week should be entirely about. The midterm stakes are simply too high to waste time fretting over the ghost of traitors past.
