The rats are eating each other

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I’ve said that the worst case scenario for us would be if Donald Trump, his lackeys, and the Republicans all managed to get on the same page with each other. If they were able to each accept their roles and work together for a common goal, they’d be able to do any corrupt and extremist thing they wanted to us. This is the scenario that’s been giving me nightmares since the election.

The best case scenario for us would be if Trump and his party and his people started fighting with each other for dominance and started going against each other’s agendas. In such case they’d start tripping over each other badly enough to create an opening for us. Fortunately, as of now it very much looks like this scenario is the one that’s playing out.

It all started to unravel when the Republican Senate told Trump he could have almost any cabinet nominees he wanted, and so he chose Matt Gaetz – one of the few names that the Republican Senate was likely to reject. Right then and there it was clear that something was wrong. Trump wasn’t willing to give the Senate what it needed, and in return the Senate wasn’t willing to give Trump what he wanted.

Sure enough, ever since, Trump’s agenda has been bogged down by how poorly his various cabinet nominations are going. Now things are getting even more bogged down, in a way that’s so cartoonishly absurd that it doesn’t even sound real.

House Republicans were all set to agree to yet another continuing resolution this week, because neither side wants to get blamed for a government shutdown. But then Elon Musk – yes, Elon Musk – decided that a government shutdown should happen. This unelected mentally incompetent whack job, who had to buy a social network just to force people to read his posts, has now decided that he’s in charge of the United States government.

Musk has been publicly bullying House Republicans in an effort to get them to go ahead and shut down the government. And now that Musk is on board, Trump is also on board. So a shutdown might end up happening. Or maybe not. At this point it’s all too tenuous to try to make any predictions.

But suffice it to say that if Musk does manage to force a government shutdown, it’s going to play very poorly for Trump. The media is pretty much pretending that Trump already is President, which means anything that happens over the next month – good or bad – is going to get assigned to Trump and not Biden. If there’s an ill timed government shutdown over the holidays, mainstream Americans are going to 1) be very upset and 2) blame Trump for it. Once that happens, Trump is surely going to blame Musk for it. We’ve all been waiting to see how long it would take Trump to turn against a showboating Musk. Weeks? Years? Months? Now we might get lucky and it might happen near-immediately.

Not only is Musk trying to force a government shutdown, he’s also seemingly now in the running for Speaker of the House. People like Marjorie Taylor Greene are openly campaigning for it. And while I don’t think it’ll happen, such a candidacy would certainly weaken Mike Johnson’s already-tenuous grip on the House.

On top of it all, we’ve got House Republican Victoria Spartz announcing that she’s not even going to bother participating in the House Republican caucus or committees, because she instead wants to spend all her time working with Elon Musk on his imaginary government agency.

Elon Musk is essentially taking over control of the United States House of Representatives. He’s now deciding what does or doesn’t get passed. He’s now picking off Republican House members for his own vanity project. He’s unofficially undermining the House Republican leadership in every way, and even seemingly trying to get himself officially put in charge of the House. Mike Johnson is a weakling, but he does have his loyalists in the House, and it’s difficult to imagine them taking this cartoonish overreach lying down.

This is very much starting to feel like yet another instance of Trump and his lackeys going way too far overboard and needlessly creating a problem for themselves. First Trump and his closest advisers made stupidly over the top nominations that forced the Republican Senate to stick up for itself, and now Trump and his dumbest adviser are making stupidly over the top moves that could force the Republican House to stick up for itself.

Of course Republicans “sticking up for themselves” really just means them getting into a battle with Trump and his lackeys over which corrupt extremist agenda they should be following and whose pockets are getting lined in what way. There are no good guys in this scenario, only competing bad guys. But if the bad guys keep turning against each other like this, it’s the best case scenario for us.

We’ll see how long this continues. For all we know Trump, his lackeys, and the Republicans might decide to set aside their differing agendas in a few months and start working together for the common evil. But for now at least, these idiots are wasting their power and influence by using it against each other instead of against us. The rats are eating each other. And thank goodness for that.

Note from Bill Palmer: I need your help! Major media outlets are caving to Trump already. Publishing platforms are at risk. Palmer Report is leading the fight. Help me make it happen:
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