Election Notes, November 5, 2024
Stop the Steal 2024
1. Rogue Software - 2020
Despite polling to the contrary, POTUS 45 was confident of a second Electoral College victory and term. The polls tended to be light on his loyal base. Much as he didn’t plan to win in 2016 and made none of the usual preparations for moving into the White House on Day One, he didn’t have a backup plan for losing in 2020, certainly not to an opponent like Sleepy Joe. In the closing days of the campaign, he could feel the energy building again on his behalf, particularly in swing states like Ohio and Florida. All night he led. His base was partying like it was 2016 or 1984.
Then came “The Steal”: “hacked” voting machines, zombie ballots, rogue software, stealth crews, purloined cartons, bamboo fibers, Biden bundles, Smartmatic swarms, Dominion dumps, Chinese hacks, Nest thermostats, Italian and Deep State space satellites, malware bankrolled by a late Venezuelan dictator, an Olympian supercloud dubbed “The Hammer,” and Scorecard software that switched “Trump” electrons into “Biden” positrons.
It was an immaculate deception—systemic fraud at unprecedented scale.
It was more truly a quirk of pandemic voting habits. Republicans, especially the MAGA faithful, preferred to vote in person on Election Day itself like attending church. Democrats favored absentee ballots: separation of church and state. Trump was warned by his advisors not to declare victory under an early Red Mirage, but he was hell-bent, and not just on November 3rd. But he had planned months earlier to declare victory on Election night regardless of the count, possession being nine-tenths of the law. Mere ballots didn’t faze him; they were the sideshow—political theater more than politics. That is, it didn’t matter how many clicks were made on whoever’s behalf; a single click was all that counted—the last. You could declare whatever number you chose then and challenge anyone else’s count. We see it most cogently in Venezuela these days.
“What people need to understand,” said Donald’s niece Mary Trump in an MSNBC interview, “is that Donald doesn’t believe he should be denied anything he wants.”1
To behave blatantly in that manner was a mistake on Trump’s part. Declaring a strategy ahead of time makes it harder to use it effectively afterward. In this case, of course, the Election was meant to be “fixed”; either Trump won legitimately, or he would call it on his own behalf. This threat now hangs far more precipitously over the 2024 Election next week. Either Trump wins, or he wins—heads he wins, tail Kamala loses. Or someone switches out the Trump nickel for a mint one. If so and Kamala wins, there will be riots in the streets. To Donald, it isn’t fair to use a fair coin.
Back to 2020. In the wards of Trump City, the Election was rigged on Joe Biden’s behalf—no doubt. “There are more ballots that are bogus ballots out there than you can shake a stick at,” declared a Maine Republican state senator.2
"Those machines are like Swiss cheese,” added Rudy Giuliani. “You can invade them. You can get in them. You can change the vote."
True in principle. But it was just as true in 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016. Some Republicans still believe that Barack Obama won the 2012 Election only because his geek squad defeated the rival one of Mitt Romney—they hacked last.
Overthrow of democracy by computer and confusion had been in the air since Bush-Gore 2000 with its hanging chits and butterfly ballots.
In 2004, Anonymous, a group previously claiming hacks of the Justice Department, Motion Picture Association of America, and Church of Scientology announced that they had reversed hacks by Karl Rove’s team in Butler, Claremont, and Warren Counties and suburban Cincinnati in swing-state Ohio as well as overrides from a Republican failsafe SMARTech link in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which had vaulted George W. Bush into the lead over John Kerry. The counter-hack was presented in manifesto-like decrees. Few noticed, and it didn’t matter because it didn’t finally succeed. As noted, George W. Bush won because his team hacked last. Yet the notion that election software can be overridden by geeks cancelling tens of thousands of votes with a computer key, changed just about everyone’s perception of the meaning of vote. It might all be a false flag.
Then before the 2008 election, a black-robed figure in a Guy Fawkes mask released a suicide-bomber-style video:
We know that you will attempt to attempt to rig the election of Mitt Romney to your favor. We will watch as your merry band of conspirators try to achieve this overthrow of the United States government. . . . We are watching and monitoring all your servers. . . . We want you to know that we are waiting for you to make this mistake of thinking you can rig this election to your favor. . . . If we catch you we will turn over all of this data to the appropriate officials in the hopes that you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.3
After Obama’s historic victory in 2008, Anonymous posted triumphantly:
We began following the digital traffic of one Karl Rove. . . . After a rather short time, we identified the digital structure of Karl’s operation and even that of his ORCA. This was an easy task in that barn doors were left open and the wind swept us inside.4
The flower was ripe for plucking. It remained unplucked for a while. Till Trump, no one dared. Then Donald only dared; it was his m.o. He had been watching the flower bloom for at least five years. So he plucked it on January 6th 2021! Why accept a life-altering verdict when it could be reversed with a gimme putt?
From Trump’s admittedly parochial view, some very bad people had stone his Presidency and were about to undo his crowning achievements. The Divine Right of Kings was so deep in his aura that he had drifted into assuming that he had been enthroned rather than elected. Authoritarianism comes so naturally to him that he takes for granted that everyone else accepts it too, that they not only share his realpolitik but secretly idolize dictators as much as he does.
He forgot because he never understood what the original Tea Party was about, and he either didn’t watch Hamilton or daydreamed through it.
Trump’s escalating tantrum proved contagious. It stirred marches, demonstrations, lawsuits, a “truthing” cult, and a cast of millions, including conspiracist attorneys, loyal or scared pols, and zealot broadcasters. For more than half the Republican electorate and eighty percent of Trump voters, the “steal” was incontrovertible. The only question was whether outing it would wake the populace, remove pretender Biden, and restore Donald’s monarchy.
Coached by a team of obedient, flaky attorneys, Trump presumed that a few key states could invalidate their authorized elector slates and send in ex post facto Trump-loyal replacements. It was the way that Trump had conducted business his whole life, by trickery, stalling, and bullying while pretending to charm. In a New York Times article, Haberman quoted Alan Marcus, a consultant who worked for the Trump Organization in the 1990s:
“Trump views the judicial system as he sees everything else: corrupt, ‘fixable’ and usable as a bullying tactic. . . . Mr. Marcus recalled Mr. Trump calling lawyers who had filed suit against him to try to convince them that “it was a waste of time and money,” then ultimately trying to get the case in front of a judge he perceived to be friendly.5
Aileen Cannon, Samuel Alioto, and Clarence Thomas suit that strategy today, with a tip of subtler s to John Roberts, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Cavanaugh. Autocrats Putin, Orbán, and Xi changed their constitutions to extend their presidencies. Orbán was democratically elected the first time just like Trump. Then from the power of office, he proceeded to rig the electoral machinery and strip the media so effectively that the playing field tilted his way. It would take a landslide to blast him out of office now. The next step in Budapest will be Soviet-style dictatorship, electoral setups that guarantee that he can’t lose because, if he does, the results will be “corrected” before they are announced—the Nicolás Maduro Venezuelan precedent
That’s what Trump tried to accomplish in a single sweep. It proved a bridge too far. Using the pretext of a stolen election, he and his Republican enablers put in place initial steps to end democracy and institute pseudo-Christian authoritarianism: redrawn districts, electoral monitors, and mechanisms for recounts until the counters got it God’s way.
The U.S. Constitution, though regarded in evangelical circles as a collective Eleventh Commandment, is surprisingly malleable. It is only as strong as the belief systems sustaining it; for instance, it can be rewritten by pastors and Supreme Court justices to serve Christian goals. Those who didn’t understand why the founders separated Congresspeople from preachers have reverted unwittingly to the very theocratic impulse that drove the Mayflower and subsequent sailing vessels out of Eyre, Scotland, and England.
Democracies don’t necessarily die under gendarmes and tanks. They wither under chicanery and gerrymanders too.
FBI-certified Russian mole Michael Flynn wanted the President to declare martial law, temporarily suspend the Constitution, seize some Swing State voting machines, and have the military supervise a do-over.
Donald even thought that if the Republicans won Congress in 2022, they could decertify the 2020 results, remove Biden, and restore him to his rightful office. He would demand, he griped, six full years as payback, enough time to prepare Donnie, Jr. for succession.
As Trump lost clearance between Reality show and reality, Mark Miley and the Joint Chiefs worried that the guy might go full banana-republic. Those closest to POTUS 45 recalled that he detonated in a blind fury whenever anyone doubted the Steal or tried to reason with him. Attorney General Bill Barr noted that when he talked to Trump, “there was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were. . . . He’s become detached from reality.”7
Did Barr just notice it then?
In bipolar-like swings of near-psychotic anxiety and omnipotent grandiosity, Trump reeled from one conspiracy theory to another—the afore-mentioned suitcases, thermostats, voting machines, Venezuelans, British, and Chinese. As each conspiracy was refuted by one of his advisors, he moved to the next, ultimately settling on conservative philosopher Dinesh D’Souza’s mathematical charade in his 2022 film 2000 Mules because it had a GED-match-like patina of satellite surveillance and digital footprints “proving” mass ballot-harvesting.
Back in the spring when Trump mentioned 1960s race riots to justify the possible use of troops to restore order, Milley set him straight, throwing cold water on the idea, part of a larger discussion that resulted in the President cursing out his top military advisors. Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker detailed the dialogue in I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year:
"Mr. President, it doesn't compare anywhere to the summer of sixty-eight," Milley said, according to the book. "It's not even close."
After senior advisor Stephen Miller chimed in to declare the protests as "an insurrection," Milley pointed to a portrait of former President Abraham Lincoln, who led the country through the American Civil War.
"Mr. President, that guy had an insurrection," Milley said. . . . "You don't have an insurrection. When guys show up in gray and start bombing Fort Sumter, you'll have an insurrection."6
Endnotes
1. Mary Papenfuss, “Trump 'Handed Down Death Sentence To Mike Pence' To Stay In Power: Mary Trump,” Huffington Post, June 19, 2022.
2. Peter LaVerdiere of Oxford, Maine quoted in “Maine presidential electors cast votes in divided outcome,” Associated Press, December 14, 2020.
3. Sam Sacks and Thomas Hartmann, “Anonymous, Karl Rove and 2012 Election Fix?” The Daily Take, November 19, 2012.
4. Sam Sacks and Thom Hartmann, “Anonymous, Karl Rove and 2012 Election Fix?” The Daily Take, November 19, 2012.
5. Maggie Haberman, “Trump’s Well-Worn Legal Playbook Starts to Look Frayed,” The New York Times, January 31, 2023.
6. David Klepper, “Jan. 6 witnesses push Trump stalwarts back to rabbit hole,” Yahoo/Associated Press, June 18, 2022.
7. John L. Dorman, “'You're all f---ed up': Trump exploded after his officials warned against using military troops to end George Floyd protests, book says,” Yahoo Business Insider, July 31, 2021.
2. STOP THE STEAL
A lack of forensic backup continued to outrage Trump and his Election truthers. To believers, it was obvious what had happened. Even the Democrats, they proclaimed, were of aware their crime. Trump-fanatic broadcaster Lou Dobbs puzzled his way through the “paradox” on his Fox News show, “We’re eight weeks from the election, and we still don’t have verifiable, tangible support for the crimes that everyone knows were committed—that is, defrauding other citizens who voted with fraudulent votes. We know that’s the case in Nevada, we know it’s the case in Pennsylvania and a number of other states, but we have had a devil of a time finding actual proof. Why?”8
He didn’t have proof, but he believed so strongly in Trump’s invincibility that a stolen victory was a 99% likelihood.
In the Opinion pages of the Sunday New York Times, Carlos Lozada wrote:
“[T]he lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 election has grown so powerful because it is yoked to an older deception, without which it could not survive: the idea that American politics is, in essence, a joke, and that it can be treated as such without consequences. The big lie depends on the big joke. It was enabled by it. It was enhanced by it. It is sustained by it. When politicians publicly defend positions they privately reject, they are telling the joke. When they give up on the challenge of governing the country for the rush of triggering the enemy, they are telling the joke. . . . When their off-the-record smirks signal that they don’t mean what they just said or did, they are telling the joke.”9
The joke precedes Trump’s “politics as performance art,” but the last scintillas of seriousness were subsumed in the confluence of the two. Now there are only costumes, props, and scripts—jokes.
If the Deep State, or a Democrat-led collusion aided by RINOs and Never Trumpers, or a corporate cabal, or the Illuminati themselves, wanted to rig an election and turn a Trump landslide into a Biden steal, they would have used the same game plan and left the same fingerprints as were left in 2020: a whopping Trump improvement from 2016 among African Americans, Hispanics, and women; a surge of 40 to 50% in midland regions; a 4.4% gain in his native New York despite his abandonment of the City for Florida; significant hikes over his 2016 numbers in Ohio, Florida, and Iowa, a Republican down-ballot near-sweep in Congressional and state legislatures; nine million more votes than his own pollsters’ 63-million victory threshold—in other words, a grand slam and royal flush.
But where’s Donald? It took a deluge of late Biden mail-in ballots to pitch four key swing states plus Arizona and Georgia.
I see three separate steals: one bogus, one legitimate, one metaphysical. First the bogus.
1) The Steal That Wasn’t
I accept that Trump thought, or convinced himself, that the 2020 election outcome was rigged and that he had won in a landslide. There was, in fact, a landslide, but only in MAGA counties—a Red Mirage enhanced by the fact that MAGA nation comprised more than eighty percent of the total counties in the U.S. Donald was blind to anti-Trump blowback in much denser blue population centers where the majority saw him as, to varying degrees, a buffoon, an emotional three-year-old, a repurposed crime boss, a con artist, a lazy imbecile, an unqualified lunatic flying in Air Force One, and a maniac holding nuclear launch codes. There was only one candidate, Trump. His opponent could have been Sylvester Cat and Trump would have lost.
Trump not only didn’t win the actual Election, he lost in a relative rout given a pretty much evenly divided electorate. Outside of Trump nation, 81 million people voted, if not for Joe Biden, then to end a national nightmare. Folks absentee-voted in unprecedented numbers to get Trump’s tweets, idiocies, grift, emoluments, and “so sad” cadences out of their lives. It wasn’t “more bogus votes than you can shake a stick at” but more new voters—did you see them lined up in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona, overriding the Red Wave? And that’s not even counting the pandemic-enhanced mail-in, harvested, and drive-by ballots—the ones Trump deemed invalid.
Trump got 11 million more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016, but Biden got 15 million more votes than Hilary Clinton did and 18 million more than Trump did the first time. Critical mass was generated and transferred through the noosphere because 66.9% of the electorate voted in 2020, compared to 55.7% in 2016. That made the difference between the Non-Steal reality and Steal perception. The so-called Steal, a turnabout that Sean Hannity claimed was mathematically impossible, was conducted by 11.2% new voters, enough to make it quite possible.
Even assuming fraudulent votes peppered among them, bootleg ballots alone would not have been anywhere near enough to override other checks and balances and overturn the results. In fact in the 2020 election, far more Republicans than Democrats were outed as double-voting or voting for dead people.
Trump was wrong too when he claimed that more than half the people who voted put their mark by his name—“your favorite President,” as he was wont to say when assuming that his self-love was requited even by folks who despised him, a narcissist’s delusion. He came closer to the truth unintentionally when he said, in effect, “81 million people didn’t vote for Sleepy Joe, he couldn’t fill an outhouse. Those were fake ballots and dead people.” Yeah, Donald, the election was about you, and you drew 150 million votes to Biden’s paltry 2 or 3 mill. But those weren’t fake ballots or dead people voting: 79 million voted nay.
The majority of Joe Biden’s votes were legit—every recount in every county or state confirmed that, even the one that Republican shill Cyber Ninjas meant to reverse in Arizona. Ballots may have been cast under pandemic rules with unprecedented eligibility and leeway, but that didn’t mean that fake or dead people voted, just that the majority of new voters voted against Trump. It also wasn’t more votes than voters or illegally cast ballots either; a third of the country still didn’t cast a ballot.
The measure that most favors Republicans, in fact, every November, is the huge numbers of nonvoting cynics, slackers, and snobs, a majority of whom are left of center, anarchists, and closet Democrats. They put Republicans in office. cycle after cycle all the way back to Richard Nixon. It was never the case that more Americans, let alone more voters wanted a second term for Trump and that their collective will was thwarted. Even if there were irregularities—and there weren’t beyond looser eligibility rules—the majority still voted “Donald, vamoose."
No MAGA Republican could ever win a referendum of all eligible voters; that’s why, afterwards, Trump loyalists wanted to change the laws and trim the bandwidth. 69% was way too many voters. 55% had proven just right—not too hot and not too cold.
This fuss was always about “who votes”—the unruly masses, descendants of slaves and mulattos, immigrants, nationless Gaians, First Nations, West and East Indians, Eurasians, Asians, Aborigines, and everyone else—or just everyone else.
What the Stop the Steal crowd wanted—and still wants—is a racist poll tax under the plausible deniability of preventing illegal immigrants from voting. Who wouldn’t want only legal voters voting? But illegal immigrants have no interest in showing up at the polls and exposing themselves; they just want to lay low and stay in the country; they don’t care who runs it.
The notion of a stolen election was part of a maturation of a global revanchist delegitimization of opposition parties. Because the opposition is considered automatically unpatriotic and socialist—the first step in authoritarian takeovers—their votes are never legitimate, and any procedure that makes it easier for them to register is de facto a “steal,” an election stolen by people who shouldn’t be allowed to vote in the first place: the other side. Semantics aside, Stop the Steal was, and still is, an attempt to replace a democracy with a putsch. It is essentially complete in Venezuela, near complete in Hungary, and had just begun in Georgia under Putin Dream Party interference.
Trump’s 2016 Electoral College margin—he lost the popular vote to an even more unpopular opponent—was thinner than a rat’s ass. A quirk here or there (plus the WWF entertainment factor) got an unprepared, unstable mountebank into office.
The different sample of eligible voters in 2020 was, as noted, because of COVID and the belief that Trump was playing golf and using the office to feather his nest and narcissism more than he was carrying out Presidential duties. But a real census wasn’t taken and never will be. There hasn’t been a truly elected president since Dwight Eisenhower, and there probably won’t be one as long as selective ineligibility under Jim Crow rules, fungible technology, voter intimidation, Citizens United, political entertainment wars, and social media are in play. Plebiscites are chaos systems, more so when you add in a virus and software. We still don’t know who really won in November before George W. Bush, John F. Kennedy, and Rutherford B. Hayes strode into the White House in January with only minor fuss—no riots or attempted coups.
2) The Steal That Was
How about the Steal that was? Mollie Hemingway, editor-in-chief of The Federalist, detailed it in her book Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections. To her view, Biden had a huge unearned advantage in the back rooms of corporations, election wards, and high tech where Aristos funded and helped organize his campaign. The Electorate was selectively enlarged, as legislatures in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan made it easier, to MAGA’s detriment, for poor people to vote (though Trump has plenty of working-class voters too; that’s his main constituency). Then the press hid the true contents and implications of Hunter Biden’s laptop until it was too late. Then 2020 COVID voting rules favored Democrats disproportionately, expanding windows for absentee and harvested ballots and extending deadlines for posting and counting, all items that stretched the electorate well above 55% participation. From a MAGA standpoint, electoral laws became as malleable than as parks and loading zones. The fact is, just about everyone in mainstream media and big tech who could tilt the 2020 election Joe Biden’s way did, either from leaning on the financial and social-media scales or hiding Joe from his own gaffes and cognitive impairments and then burying the laptop story—Hunter Biden was a manipulator and crook who had, if possible, as little respect for democracy as the Trump boys.
Yes, POTUS 45 got rolled.
While drop boxes, absentee ballots, unsupervised ballots at nursing homes, and the like might have flipped the winner in key swing states, Mollie–those were still legal voters,. Your so-called “Steal” came from Aristos and corporations priming their 14% turnout boost, not from a scam or hacked software. It was even out in the open. Time magazine heralded it as “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election”:
In a way, Trump was right. There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEO’s. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. . . . Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. . . . After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result.”10
Marc Short, Mike Pence’s chief of staff, noted rightly that politics is politics and that Trump was not the only one capable of hardball, “We often observed the irregularities that occurred during the 2020 election, the reality that Democrats effectively weaponized election changes that were the result of Covid, but ultimately it was important to catalog the various allegations and where there was hard evidence, or lack thereof, of actual theft.”11
That’s where Lou Dobbs went ballistic, confusing the two. Partisans do what they can to elect their candidate, and that includes soliciting funds from people who have money to throw away and expect something in return, the sort of behavior enabled by Citizens United conclusion’s that cash is a form of free speech. They then use the levers of government (national, state, local) and the sway of corporate hierarchies (national, transnational, and foreign) to influence the outcome and balance of power.
Trump lost the count on the field, but he also lost the game inside the game, and that’s what rankles him and the Stop the Steal crowd most. They are sore losers, flaunting a double standard of righteous indignation. Mollie Hemingway’s rigged election is every election. Her neo-Federalist, MAGA-loyal argument comes down to an originalist view of poll-tax-like laws that were meant to keep the majority of people from voting under, as noted, the plausible deniability of the sanctity of the right to vote. The game didn’t work this time, and certain people, most of whom considered Trump divinely coronated and/or a Republican savior and patriots’ dream, were so addicted to their Moral Majority hype, Ms. Hemingway among them, that they believed in the imperative of their own “majoritism.”
Her Stop the Steal was accurate—the Democrats had figured out how to stop a Republican steal with their own.
Radical journalist Christopher Hedges, hardly a Trump supporter, shined a different light on the “Steal” after he got canceled from YouTube overnight—something like ‘Trump is bad, but you guys were worse because you enabled him’:
The most vocal cheerleaders for this censorship are the liberal class. Terrified of the enraged crowds of QAnon conspiracy theorists, Christian fascists, gun-toting militias, and cult-like Trump supporters that grew out of the distortions of neoliberalism, austerity, deindustrialization, and the collapse of social programs, they plead with the digital monopolies to make it all go away. They blame anyone but themselves. Democrats in Congress have held hearings with the CEOs of social media companies pressuring them to do more to censor content. Banish the troglodytes. Then we will have social cohesion. Then life will go back to normal. Fake news. Harm reduction model. Information pollution. Information disorder. They have all sorts of Orwellian phrases to justify censorship. Meanwhile, they peddle their own fantasy that Russia was responsible for the election of Donald Trump. It is a stunning inability to be remotely self-reflective or self-critical, and it is ominous as we move deeper and deeper into a state of political and social dysfunction.
What were my sins? I did not, like my former employer, The New York Times, sell you the lie of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, peddle conspiracy theories about Donald Trump being a Russian asset, put out a 10-part podcast called the Caliphate that was a hoax, or tell you that the information on Hunter Biden’s laptop was “disinformation.” I did not prophesize that Joe Biden was the next FDR or that Hillary Clinton was going to win the election.12
I agree with Hedges, and I confess that I too thought it was crucial to prevent a second Trump term at any cost, even rigging the results if necessary. Guilty as charged!
I fell back on my neo-Liberal past and bias. I forgot that Trump won the first time by calling the Democrats on their hype to their base, lies of convenience and electioneering. The 2016 vote was lost for Hilary the moment Barack took a drink of Flint tap water and said, “Yum, yum, tastes fine.” That was the epitome of a neo-Lib scam, from cannabis criminalization to drone fleets over Afghanistan captained from Florida to decriminalizing mortgage-crisis criminals. Kamala is no prize either, but anyone who is a prize wouldn’t dare run. No one truly intelligent would get into politics; it would be suicidal for themselves and their families. It would take a profile in courage beyond John F. Kennedy’s fondest imaginings.
Yet I participated emotionally and gladly in the Steal That Was.I was terrified that the country wouldn’t survive another four years of a guy who thought that Finland was still part of Russia, that Slovenia and Slovakia were the same country, and who believed that diplomacy consisted of being unpredictable. The nuclear football shouldn’t be in the hands of a three-year-old playing “She loves me, she loves me not.” I was relieved that Trump got rolled and that there were no fingerprints or actionable crimes.
I didn’t consider it partisan pandering; I didn’t see Trump as a Republican, I saw him as a sadistic sociopath and a mafia influenced crook.
The “Stop the Steal crowd” similarly thinks that the country can’t survive four more years of Princess Kamala and Demented Joe, so they will try to rig the 2024 plebiscite and Electoral College any way they can.
The guy who didn’t expect to win the first time probably should have taken his chips and gone home because it wasn’t just a parlor game for the Aristos and liberals. Plus, he didn’t really want to serve anyway, he just wanted to throw his weight around, monetize the Presidency, fly Air Force One to golf matches, and get to brag about his holes-in-one on taxpayer dimes. He mailed in his term. Mafioso love leisure, tributes, and graft even more than pleasure itself.
Here’s a thought experiment: Suppose that Donald Trump was hit and killed by a meteorite on November 4, 2024. Suppose that it was an extra-galactic meteorite along the lines of ’Oumuamua. Let’s assume it was traveling at 80 kilometers a second, a bit faster than the fastest Milky Way meteors. That would mean that it was set on its course before our sun (Sol) existed. The only thing that could change that course was gravity, the same gravity that contributed to the birth of stars.
The odds of a person being hit by a meteorite are 1 in 1.6 million, though it seems that they should be higher give that the Earth’s human population is 8.2 billion. I’m not sure of my math, but I think it would indicate more than 5300 hits a year, which is not the case.
If you include animals, the odds go up exponentially, but the odds of knowing about in a hit in the case of nondomestic animals in the wild is probably 1 in a trillion.
The most famous case of a person being hit but not killed by a meteorite was a woman named Anne Hodges in 1954 in Alabama; the space rock came through her roof and injured her hip. The only recorded case of death by meteorite was in Turkey in the 1880s. On August 22, 1888, multiple documents from the General Directorate of State Archives of the Presidency of the Republic of Turkey indicate that, according to three independent witnesses, a meteorite hit and killed one man while paralyzing another.
Given all these facts, if Trump were hit and killed by a meteorite on November 4, 2024, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lindsay Graham, and the entire Trump family and MAGA contingent would blame it on the Democrats. It would be the same science that blames weathermen for hurricanes and sunspots for global warming.
Endnotes
8. Lou Dobbs, Fox Business News, January 5, 2021.
9. Carlos Lozada, “The Big Joke That Became the Big Lie,” The New York Times Opinion Section, September 25, 2022, p. 6.
10. Jim Troupis, “The Cancer of Election Fraud,” Americanmind.org, May 23, 2022.
11. Betsy Woodruff Swan, “Pence team couldn't verify Trump campaign's election fraud claims, new memo shows,” Politico, June 10, 2022.
12. Christopher Hedges, “On Being Disappeared,” ScheerPost, March 28, 2022.
3. SHOW ME THE KRAKEN
3) Transcendental Tampering
My third “steal” is an esoteric one: rogue permutations in tabulating networks, but from where?
Well, those UFOs, made of unknown isotopes of common metals, flitting in and out of ordinary reality that hovered around nuclear sites in the U.S. and Soviet Union demonstrated how they could turn on and off launch commands.
Compared to deep silo encryptions and firewalls, Dominion software would have been a cakewalk. I go with my college classmate Sid Schwab, a retired surgeon whose book Cutting Remarks I published. He said, “A surgeon can kill you . . . and you’ll sleep right through it.”13 If UFOs can hack nuclear launch codes, they can flip elections, and we’ll sleep right through it. To a congress of Earth-protecting E.T.s, a second Trump term might have been the equivalent of nuclear winter.
And as for that matching paper trail in Georgia, Dutch psychic Gerard Croisset proved the precognitive power of telekinesis. Replacing cards after the fact is psychic duck soup for interdimensional time-travelers. Read Douglas Adams’ hitchhiker’s guides to the galaxy for how to get a boat inside a bottle with too small a neck ex post facto.
On the higher spheres, every election may go through a double-slit reality with alternate results. The real wheel remains in quantum spin. Perhaps Trump was a magician but in the service of a Blackwater-type intelligence—the quintessential Manchurian candidate, not only groomed by the Russians to sink the West but body-snatched by Nazi ghosts, Klingons, and Greys.
Maybe a combination of deep-state CIA, FBI, and Pentagon actors, in concert with corporate CEOs, the world’s most skilled hackers and cyber- pros—a deeper “deep state” with undetectable means—decided to end Trumpmania.
Stooges like Mitch McConnell, John Cornyn, Lindsay Graham, and Roy Blunt were convinced; Newsmax was too, either that Biden won or that it behooved them to say so.
Only Election Truthers dug in. To them, as to Trump, the nation had folded. "You're quitting! You're a quitter! You're not fighting!" Michael Flynn screamed at Trump impeachment lawyer Eric Herschmann. Turning to Trump, he added, "Sir, we need fighters."13
When Herschmann then asked Trump conspiracy-theorist attorney Sidney Powell why, if she had such a strong case, she had lost so many appeals, she replied that “it was because all the judges, both state and federal, were corrupt.”15
"That's your argument?" Herschmann responded incredulously. "Even the judges we appointed? Are you out of your fucking mind?"16
The master crook was outcrooked, “out-nemessed” by a deeper deep state, his lies swallowed in a bigger lie. And they slept right through it.
Everywhere the Trumpians searched, they saw or heard a sasquatch indicator—a tuft of fur, a pawprint, an alien turd, a humanoid yowl—so they went full yeti, magnifying each real and imagined perfidy into a menagerie.
A hillbilly dude at a 2021 CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) meeting—he went by the name Grizzly Joe—inadvertently spilled the beans when he turned the tables on a reporter, asking him rhetorically about a missing cryptid. His comments read throughout at two levels:
‘I gotta have the evidence. I gotta see it,” Joe said. “If you tell me you're gonna release the Kraken, show me the freakin’ Kraken for crying out loud. Show me the freakin’ Kraken. Show me a piece of the Kraken. Show me something.
“And don't tell me to go to Mr. Pillow man's website to get the information, and I click on there and you get a million sites, ads pop up and I'm still not gonna see even a fingernail of the freakin’ Kraken.”17
It’s reassuring that someone, physical or metaphysical, deep state or kraken, had enough leverage to pull it off, just as it’s sort of reassuring if E.T.’s—time-travelers, tricksters from a parallel universe, psychoids, inner-earth dwellers—won’t allow our self-destruction. We may be part of a cosmic federation, our destinies entwined. The true Deep State may not even be in this dimension.
Endnotes
13. Sid Schwab, Cutting Remarks, back cover.
14. Harry Litman, “Trump’s impeachment defense is threadbare and irrelevant. But he’ll probably win,” Los Angeles Times, February 3, 2021.
15. Harry Litman, “Trump’s impeachment defense. . . .”
16. Harry Litman, “Trump’s impeachment defense. . . .”
17. Stephen Proctor, “Trump supporter at CPAC rails against election fraud lies: 'Show me the freakin' Kraken',” Yahoo Entertainment, July 13, 2021.
4. Permutations Leading up to Election Day 2024
Permutation 1:
A. The 2024 is at worst a toss-up, at best a slight edge to Kamala Harris
versus
B. The 2024 Election has already been rigged directly by the likes of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Russell Vought, and indirectly Benjamin Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin, Jeff Bezos, and John Roberts. We don’t have to know how they did to expect the worst, that Trump can’t lose and knows he can’t lose.
Permutation 2:
A. Even if Trump wins, he has deteriorated mentally so much that he won’t be able to function in office, he is only running to stay out of jail
versus
B. If Trump wins, he is going to go after his enemies, cut taxes for the rich, attempt to deport a million people, and bomb cities in Iran in reprisal for the hit put out on him. It will be a shit show that would be fun to watch from another dimension but not much fun to live, a rare instance in which the rich will be as unhappy as the poor.
Permutation 3:
A. There are only two reasons for people to vote for Trump (per an online article): you are rich and want to save money on taxes or you are angry at the world and want someone to manifest your anger
versus
B. There are many other compelling reasons to vote for Trump: (3) you believe his lies and take what he says literally; (4) you expect him to deliver what he promises even though he didn’t the first time he was President (5) and has no power to deliver it; (6) you share his racist views; (7) you have been swept into the MAGA cult and you worship him like a rock star or sports hero, your heart inexplicably soars when you see him, and (8) you can’t stand Kamala or Walz
Permutation 4:
A. Trump is the only outlier. If he stops aside to allow J D Vance to take over once he has fired Jack Smith and put an end to the inquiries into January 6th and his possession of official documents containing war plans against Iran, Vance will revert to the 2016 version of himself when he compared Trump to Hitler and otherwise behaved sanely. America always reverts to the center.
versus
B. Vance is in on the plot and knows that that his future and perhaps his life depend on carrying out the MAGA game plan across 50 states, Puerto Rico, and Guam, etc., such that America will slowly have the life squeezed out of it like Weimar, Germany. We are not exception; if it can happen in Nigeria or Sudan or Gaza or Belarus, it can happen in low-information, trivia-obsessed America where the only qualification for being a Reality star is being a Reality star.
Permutation 5:
A. Even if Vance is in on the plot, American institutions, democracy, balance of powers, States rights, and hip-hop and trans culture are so strong that they will override and make mincemeat out of the Project 2025 agenda. The moral, cross-cultural, and productive, creative majority will prevail over a bunch of White businessmen who think they can crush an alternative culture that is ten times their size, and the unaffiliated military and National Guard will rebel against enforcing martial law
versus
B. Any counterculture and freedom of speech can be squelched and the voluntary military has already been substantially infiltrated and corrupted.
Some additional thoughts:
1) On Trump’s behalf—he ran in the primaries albeit pretty much unopposed, and he did defeat rivals Tim Scott, Ron DeSantis, and Nikki Haley, once considered formidable opponents, mano a mano.
Kamala Harris never won anything at a Presidential level and never got to 1% of the vote the only time she ran. She was appointed Vice-President and succeeded Joe Biden without ever winning an national election. She ascended immediately from an unpopular Vice-Presidency to the great female hope mainly from relief that a failing Biden wasn’t go to run.
Voters instinctively consider her a loser whose been given power and rank she didn’t earn. In an open primary Josh Shapiro, governor of California, or Gretchen Whitmer, governor of Michigan, might have run away from her. Governor Gavin Newsome of California might have also, but I don’t count him because the same constituency elected him as elected Harris D.A. and Senator. Unlike in Pennsylvania or Michigan, California was like running unopposed.
2) On Harris’s behalf—Trump’s capacity for self-sabotage is unlimited. He decided to see how many people he could be alienate just when he seemed to be flipping voters away from Haarris—how it’s hard to imagine; it couldn’t be all the lies on two-tone posters indicating that Harris will raise taxes and cause an increase in crime while Trump will lower taxes and keep you safe, and does anyone change their vote from a poster, so why all the litter and waste of resoures? His MAGA comedian cronies released a blast of anti-Hispanic rhetoric at Madison Square Garden where it was sure to flip at least a meaningful number of Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania away from MAGE. The backlash is spreading “like wildfire” there according to Yahoo as I write.
3) Part of Trump’s game and appeal is a joke is a joke and can’t you take a joke. It is maddening to anyone who thinks about the consequences of human actions in the coming years, but it wins votes when Trump shows up in uniform to flip burgers or drives a garbage truck to highlight a Biden gaffe. This is exactly what Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are incapable of: humor, self-confidence, perspective, spontaneity, honesty. Couldn’t Walz have just said, “Yeah, I drove drunk once a long time ago and got caught. I haven’t done it since and don’t plan on doing it, but I was a bit wild when I was young.” Instead, he pretended the question wasn’t asked and kept deflecting it as if that would be an admired skill. If the Harris-Walz loses a close election, I credit that. If he had said something like what I proposed, my feeling is that they would be running away with the Election at the polls. Of course, I will vote gladly for Harris-Walz. But I wish they were better candidates. It’s not too late, guys.
4) Though Harris and Walz have no excuse for not standing up for Gaza, Trump’s unrestrained support for Likud politics and attacking Iran, make him the worse choice; even Gazans and Iranians don’t want him.
5) Young people who polled for Harris are more likely, percentage-wise, to actually vote than people who polled for Trump, a meaningful number of whom consider actual voting a waste of time and uncool for a variety of reasons ranging from a belief that the technology is rigged to misguided belief that one vote doesn’t matter. Lindy and I are, as noted, are now in Bar Harbor where we are registered. Eastern Maine like Omaha has one electoral vote. There are quite credible if statistically very unlikely scenarios whereby Lindy’s and my two votes tip Eastern Maine to Harris-Walz, and that one electoral vote tips the Electoral College to her, 270-268. Trump would be pissed at me if I were the cause of his going to jail, but then he would never know because I am just part of a psychic swell melding a few thousand people who might not have voted into one consciousness singularity at the polls. Take my intention away, and numerous others fall away too. It’s like the 2000 butterfly ballot in Florida, only in reverse.
6) When someone tries to give a thorough list like mine, something that no one has thought of will happen. When you are done reading, think outside the box.
Post-Election Political Note (November 8, 2024)
Obviously the political situation cries out for a response. I am still absorbing it, but my first thought is that our demography, as a country and a world, is different from what I thought it was. We are in a hysterical spiral, unaware of its origin and heedless of its consequences.
My second thought is that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz were deeply flawed candidates. Harris still hasn’t won anything national, even a primary, and Walz joined her in a prevent defense, playing not to lose rather than to win. Josh Shapiro would have been better—or Gretchen Whitmer and Josh Shapiro. No one may have been able to override the demography, but an inspired campaign could have ridden it at par with Donald Trump.
Trump’s native skill or natural genius is that he speaks directly, and he sounds as though he means what he says. We still don’t know what Harris and Walz are thinking, and we also don’t know what they were planning to do to improve people’s lives or even what they wanted to tell us about what they wanted to do. Their platform was based on that prevent defense: say nothing that will offend anyone, dance around difficult issues. Trump plays both sides agianst the middle too, but he does it with conviction. His platform will almost certainly yield nothing either, but he will blame it on Biden, defer to Vance, and quietly deterioriate mentally, even to full dementia, before his term is up. He may or may not make life much worse, but the sun rising this morning looked quite different. The sky knew. I looked different to myself in the mirror too. I couldn’t hide.
Also, alas, it was a “good” election for health freedom. Even more “alas” perhaps, is that health freedom was one reason why Trump won: at least the appearance of choice and, of course, Robert Kennedy, Jr., as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Neither choice nor freedom is a simple, linear matter—that’s the problem with RFK, Jr. (on top of his twenty-seven mistresses), but the illusion always wins out, and did yesterday.
Statistically, I am guessing that a percentage of my readers voted for Trump. I am also guessing that for each of you who didn’t vote for Trump, there are at least ten people who you assume also didn’t who did.