Trump's Thermidor

What may yet be referred to as the Republican "leadership" – after a long descent through denial, anger, acceptance, bargaining, denial of a different brand and, finally, full-throttled anger and what must be a great swag of depression, if not publicly weathered – was aroused last weekend, with several senators and a multitude of not too colourful, but clearly resenting voices calling for the man chosen by its own National Convention – a compound nearly banished from our vocabulary, not for obscure reasons – to steer the course through a tumultuous contest either to step down at own volition or be forcibly uncrowned and replaced. How well the hitherto obscure Governor Pence would fare in an election once expected to carry Republican favour I cannot say, aside that I would not stake many a penny in his favour. Asides the sordid case of late nominee Horace Greeley in 1872 (and possibly the sordid case of Thomas Eagleton one century later) I can find no comparison to this eventuality. At any rate, the possibility for a peaceful resolution is in vain. The game is now on, the issue of arrest - and, who knows, what else - warranted, the tiny, loyal clique of supporters decidedly shackled to the fate of their leader walled up in a proverbial Hôtel de Ville, awaiting the apparent onslaught as the final, desperate appeal to the people to whom it has posed such an audacious and unique offer is made by a visibly shaken leader – seemingly broken, perhaps prescient of an outcome already occurring. All left now is the shorter way out, to make the exit before the otherwise defining and decidedly humiliating chute. For as the great Anthony said; "When the fall is all that's left, it matters a great deal." The art of a great deal, one might say.

The night is over; the immovable strongman, so recently so cherished, and feared, inexorably moving and rebuking minions and equals alike... now paid undue respects by his just as many detractors.

Because where there was previously discontented silence, and the occasional, not-too-sassy stand on principle, the board of a game thought determined and locked by the National Convention has been violently overwrought in general revulsion from a leadership long willing to act the audience and either fleece from, or isolate the outcome to its sole actor - most cynical stand, and dangerous for the very republican ideal on which the most influential political party in the history of the republic – some would say in history - bears its name. Most sensationally, though perhaps surprising no one, Speaker Paul Ryan publicly disallowed the same actor's presence at the recent event in Elkhorn, Wisconsin. The unlimited amnesia, not to say forgiveness, of social conservative or Evangelical voters towards a man who a generation past could hardly be fathomed as a nominee even with a psychic ability to predict controversy far exceeds my incredulity, but has after this revelation, a deliberate choice of word, now definitely drawn a line between those who demand from their presumed leaders at least a fraction of the piousness they proclaim in themselves, if yet with the burden of proof strongly lodged on the back of their chosen to disprove rather than earn, and those whose pursuit of sheer adulation for the premier office - not just of the first state born from the Enlightenment, but for all humankind - is a matter of spur and emotional, momentary pragmatism. Likewise, the reactions of the most critics is astounding. For anyone to gasp in offense at the last line of quotes repeated and re-issued and suggest a line has now been crossed, there must be either a strong obsession with Donald Trump - a quality I share not, nor do I regard it as particularly useful - or some very elusive form of embarrassment. Nevertheless, that controversy can make strange bedfellows is as true as the opposite, and the current upheaval seems to have made at last a halt in this supreme of contests. With weeks left to the final phase, a party divided against its nominee - a fact long-since known, undercut temporarily as applause drowned out laughter and contempt - now painstakingly stated in unprecedented excommunication. I believe this to be seen as the bullet irretrievably lodged where it is most undesired, from whatever quarter you say it was delivered.

For this halt, which ought have happened far earlier if its power was to be harnessed, rather than an obstacle to the conservative movement, there are a multitude of good reasons - most lately, even promises, on live television, of outcomes which even a special court can make by its own judgment, which subjects the question of Trump's intentions and aims to questions requiring further scrutiny or, in the absence of executive experience - of which he has none - speculation on very hard facts. To believe the "malignant clown" (Mark Kirk's words and, yes, I know of his stroke, but even if you have just posed he thus did conflate the Illinois' own, deceased entrepreneurial psychopath with his party's nominee, the proposal that he might have ought to frighten as much as the term itself) to surrender would, knowing everything about his oft-mentioned temperament, be as presumptuous as his own expectations of the feats of an administration yet to be dawned. With or without a speedy change of captain, the Republican galley seems sure to continue the voyage onto the rocks of resenting popular opinion under the auspices by its disowned figurehead.

The question now is, with the party unleashing a wave of long-held discontent, which of many factions and even more oarsmen toiling the primaries will emerge supreme in 2020? I will not believe that the party which will hold he House for at least two more years is yet to collapse, nor that Democrats will resurge as the unquestioned beacon it once was - that is, when it was a bridge divided between the rantings of Teddy Bilbo and the oratory of Hubert Humphrey - without a convincing turn-around. The results of the eighth is a contest lost rather than won, asides from the supreme title to be inscribed at he top of a resume likely never again to be used - in my contention, the first and last object of "both" candidates. What is left to see which path would be taken, with this greatest of peaks scaled.

Hey, guys? Guys? How are you? Great! Ready to strap anti-tank guns and march into Russia, if I demanded it? I doubt it, just as I doubt he could connive it – except through carelessness.

More than once, by fools and otherwise thoughtful commentators, the Republican nominee's rise has been heralded, near-prophetically (and as I have claimed, there is much reason to distrust prophets, especially those who claim continuity) second coming of Hitler, which seems to hint of a lacking registry of candidates, as well as equating the concept of populism and demagoguery - two attributes present in the Nazi dictator, and also many, many others - with the uniquely positioned existence in history of a movement and a shepherd so convicted, so synchronised that they could be far more beloved, far more powerful, and far more destructive than most good efforts of a century, many centuries of destructive amoral annihilists. Indeed, if one were to level a stronger case against Mr Trump than bigotry, a whimsical repudiation of constitutional restraint and the willingness to turn his critics' most arbitrary or indefensible (and thus useless as arguments) attributes as means of crude verbal assault - self-evidently opportunistic in his case, and wavering as soon as confronted about it - and put them next to more precarious areas such as consistency in ideology, degree of commitment to a genuine cause, and operational knowledge of foreign policy. Whatever else may been, or should be repeated or the German butcher, I would claim all three pendula to swing in Trump's disfavour. Indeed, assuming his mother were an aunt of my preferred Democratic nominee - yes, my views are probably closer to hers (though arguably we will never know, will we?) but you know who I am talking about, and I haven't had to explain why - the Donald's public persona would represent an almost unimprovable stereotype of America Horrida; uncultured, greedy, inconsistent, stupid, of mixed origin and emergent from a culture of management, cheat and deal-making rather than leadership, loyalty and sacrifice. Trump is an echo of Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus (otherwise known as Nero) or conceivably of Shakespeare's hunchback with a callosal commissure brought in level with his spine - not of the Austrian kitsch painter.

Which would be worse? Think carefully, before you let enmity decide who you select for a representative.

The Donald's attempt at a riposte, though not without an astounding weight of Tu Quoque, has indeed a pointed end insufficiently exposed by Trump's critics and hardly ever repudiated by Mr Clinton's defenders, in answer to Mrs. Clinton's attempts to pose as a vindicator of the suppressed, the small, those whose hard-working existence lack the offered hand of lucrative fundraising connections to improve a harsh, struggling existence to a flourishing one. Regard these many elusive yet undeniable facts, the relative silence of the press, or tendency to wave away even substantially documented accusations as mere tools of a pure opportunist - which, as you already note, do not dilute her her claims to be the same title, unlike the kingship one of great collegiality - does pose a disgrace to the two guardians of political freedom; the public and the media, and herald the decline of the wit and strenuousness of both to safeguard these institutions.

The past, the future? I would say the past and the present joined, and ask - with a sordid tongue - what the future is to bring.

The winds of and a reason late awakened are unlikely to turn - and if I were to come with a more audacious, as well as arguably optimistic expectation, I expect the great scion of Bordeaux to come up strong against the Nicolas, and sweep the road into the Elysée Palace ahead of the otherwise second female head of an official nuclear power (and the third greatest arsenal at that) the coming spring. And as the tide will wash again, for the first time since Andrew Jackson, a Democrat to be succeeded after two full terms by virtue of election, there is the painstaking question what this future holds, and what promises it will keep. The campaign, with the former in store as a strong contender, has been the most filthy and "de-issued" in late history, and to relish that the worse of two devils faced a sordid defeat will prove scant consolation once the words and paper of inauguration day has long been lost to bleak and chilling winds.

Watching the times. Please, stay in them.

It is time to think, and stop only to avert disaster, what is to be the future that lies beyond the administration unusually optimistically heralded once - and yes, I remember it - with clamours of "Hope" and "Change". While Obama could deliver passion in abundance alien to the deep and needy days of a financial collapse whose extent we, at the end of his chapter in the book of presidents still ponder – and wisdom yet to be molded and evaluated through the emerging decades - the Barras who now emerges through the halls – seemingly confident, but to the clamour of what, except the relief of what may just have been averted? - may be a beacon of stability and consideration, perhaps even consensus, but marked with a historical importance that will be exhausted before her reign even began. It is time to reflect on the time beyond the laying the groundworks. There is time now for proper thinking, and proper leadership to arise, in the marketplace of ideas if not yet in the halls of temporal power.


If properly weathered in Swedish, please check out my brief conclusion on the two candidates and the prospects as I saw them last summer. With regards to a more precise weighing of the candidates, I think Sam Harris has it right, twice - or near enough to make scant difference. Shaped in my own words and boiled down to a single sentence; if I lived in a state with a substantial Democratic majority, I would sure as as a hot oven is an insufficient metaphor for a place of unimaginable and eternal torment be tempted to put my mark in the box next to Johnson or Stein. That, again, should be construed as something other than preference or confidence in their abilities or qualifications.

And yes, the Joffrey v. Cersei analogy is clear and deliberate. I believe them, from the major characters of Mr. Martin's great series, to best represent the faces of the donkey and the elephant this year. Let us see, and hopefully soon, and in a forum more suitable "for better or for worse", how that preference plays out :P