Gene Collier: The Trump train is the last train to Crazytown
Gene Collier / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The calendar insists this race for the White House still isn’t over, a race that gets crazier every time you think it can’t get any crazier, so it’s probably crazier still to try and freeze frame it in the moment, one week out from Election Day.
Somehow I feel like we’re up to it.
The ground rules
First, let’s quickly review the ground rules as interpreted by the stable genius leading the Republican ticket for the third consecutive cycle.
Votes for Kamala Harris are fraudulent. Votes for Donald J. Trump are legit. Trump will accept the results of the election so long as the election is fair, defined as an election that Trump wins. Any Trump win shall be defined as a landslide, while any Trump loss will be “an embarrassment to our country.”
It’s all right there in our mental muscle memory, if you will, so no one should be surprised with the way it will play out. There are still plenty of election drop boxes to be lit on fire, of course, but that’s well underway in Washington and Oregon, so somebody’s already warming to the larger task at hand.
One week from today, Trump will declare victory, well before all the ballots are counted and certified. The only potential variable is this — the more evident it becomes that he’s losing, the earlier he’ll say that he’s won.
Last time he waited until 2:29 a.m. the next day, but I’m projecting just this side of midnight for 2024. Fortunately for the felonious candidate, Trump’s own mental muscle memory has the text from 2020 all cued up.
“This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.”
It was a lie that night and it’s a lie today, a democracy-convulsing lie that’s been sustained for four years through Trump’s own gargantuan mendacity, the convicted liars at Fox News, and the various MAGA lickspittles in Congress and in state legislatures coast-to-coast including Pennsylvania’s.
Trying to enrage
The lie is all Trump has left. When it was time for closing arguments, he did not assemble the best and the brightest GOP policy persuaders for his Madison Square Garden Spectacular. He did not even assemble the half dozen down ballot Republicans in contested New York House races who could prove crucial to his further skullduggery. He summoned comics and wrestlers and Putin apologists to insult the very voters he most needs to win the election.
As I’ve said for months in this space, Trump is not trying to win. He’s trying to enrage his loyalists to fight for him when he doesn’t.
In Pennsylvania, the fiercest battleground of the battleground states, 500,000 Puerto Ricans including nearly 300,000 registered voters are now inflamed from one of Trump’s speakers calling their native land a floating island of garbage in the Atlantic. Puerto Ricans further make up a potentially pivotal portion of the electorate in Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, and North Carolina, all battlegrounds as well.
That’s trying to win? That’s trying to incite.
Later at Trump’s Garden party, the headliner couldn’t help himself from giving the game away by turning to Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House, and winking over the final contingency.
“I think with our little secret we are gonna do really well in the House, right?” Trump said, looking to Johnson. “Our little secret is having a big impact. He and I have a secret. We will tell you when the race is over.”
There’s nothing too mysterious in there, is there? The object in the weeks after the election would be to create just enough chaos to engender just enough doubt that the issue winds up in the House of Representatives, where each state would cast a single vote and Trump could win an election he lost.
Trump’s first four days
If that happens, a new administration will hurry about all the things Trump has promised to do on Day 1, which he’s said includes the start of the largest deportation operation in American history, the end of birthright citizenship, and about 100 other things that used to be flatly impossible given the Constitutional limits on presidential power. Quite a day for a guy who might or might not show up for work by 11 and leaves with enough sunlight left for 18 holes.
You’d expect it to take until at least Day 2 before he gets around to appointing a “real special prosecutor,” to go after the Bidens “and all others involved with the destruction of our elections, borders, and our country itself.” Hoping that the media entities who’ve committed “treason” can wait until Day 3 (you’re good Jeff Bezos), and that the national guard or the military coming for “the enemy within,” can be Day 4 or later.
Anything that has angered Trump — and it would appear they are numerous — most particularly those related to his election fraud fantasy, “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
So sayeth His Highness, King Donald I.
Gene Collier’s previous column was “Trump's favorite word, and my favorite words for him.”