Imagine someone competent filling his shoes with the unprecedented powers that were recently granted by the supreme court and the rabid MAGA fanbase behind them.
During the early pandemic, I was 100% convinced he was going to declare a national state of emergency as a pretense for a kind of coup. It would have been easy to have disproportionate military occupation of population centers like NYC, enforcing curfews, enforcing distancing and masking, while generally fomenting unrest through non-military groups. Throw in some old-fashioned resource scarcity by restricting shipping in the name of quarantine and, baby, you have a stew going. Once people are incited to riot, martial law is easy to justify.
Instead, the Republican party doubled-down on the dumbest plan possible - literally betting on the stupidity of their base - to secure political power. The sheer greed, ego, and narcissism in the upper echelon of their leadership has them stepping on their own feet half the time, and I’m convinced we’re lucky for that.
It’s a good thing the Republican leadership is as incompetent as they are morally bankrupt, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t managed to stumble their way into pushing the US to the brink of a dictatorship. As the KGB used to say, a lot of them are “useful idiots” which can be orchestrated by careful external manipulation.
During the early pandemic, I was 100% convinced he was going to declare a national state of emergency as a pretense for a kind of coup. It would have been easy to have disproportionate military occupation of population centers like NYC, enforcing curfews, enforcing distancing and masking, while generally fomenting unrest through non-military groups. Throw in some old-fashioned resource scarcity by restricting shipping in the name of quarantine and, baby, you have a stew going. Once people are incited to riot, martial law is easy to justify.
Instead, the Republican party doubled-down on the dumbest plan possible - literally betting on the stupidity of their base - to secure political power. The sheer greed, ego, and narcissism in the upper echelon of their leadership has them stepping on their own feet half the time, and I’m convinced we’re lucky for that.
It’s a good thing the Republican leadership is as incompetent as they are morally bankrupt, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t managed to stumble their way into pushing the US to the brink of a dictatorship. As the KGB used to say, a lot of them are “useful idiots” which can be orchestrated by careful external manipulation.