Update: The Pandemic Coup

UPDATE to Post of 6/2/20: My Darkest Concern: The Pandemic Coup.

Well, that didn’t take too long. Essentially only a few days from my finally having published my concerned musing. The crisis did not exactly come the way I had imagined, but it did come. Trump essentially tried an extra-constitutional use of the military against domestic targets and the military told him to fuck right off.

Apparently, it involved a lot of swearing and hours of argumentation with General Milley, but essentially Trump has been told in no uncertain terms that he cannot use the military to occupy American cities. It will be interesting to read that portion of Milley’s eventual book, or the Congressional testimony, if the House ever does its fucking job — whichever comes first.

The number of former top military officials and military legal experts, including his own former Defense Secretary General Mattis (a wholly unprecedented rebuke of a sitting President), that have denounced Trump’s attempted coup tells me that he has effectively been removed from the military chain of command for non-routine matters.

I’m frankly still looking forward with a vague hope to the day that our professional military and scientific leadership team up to protect national security from the threat of Coronavirus (and Trump) and decide to simply ignore the President about the epidemic, and just take charge of a real national response to the epidemic themselves. Not great from a normative standpoint, but there are so many broken norms lying about, what’s one more if it saves tens or hundreds of thousand American lives?

A little face-saving acknowledgment of the President’s great leadership and arm’s length management is all that would really be required to pull this off. Just make it clear to Trump that they are going to do what’s needed and that he is required to STFU about it and just take the credit. This may still happen if the currently building “second wave” gets going strongly enough, and the President and GOP governors refuse to take any action, as it appears they are wont to do. Or, rather, not do.

The next big Constitutional crisis over military control that will likely present, however, is whether the military will allow themselves to be used to “wag the dog” in international affairs as the election approaches. I strongly suspect that Trump will have the brilliant idea of starting a marvelous little war to distract and rally the American people (or at least his base) behind his ‘leadership’. Whether the military will have the same scruples about snuffing out foreign lives for Trump’s aggrandizement that they have shown when asked to snuff out Americans, remains to be seen. My guess will be that Trump will try to stir the shit with Iran, or some other useful whipping boy, before the election. Who knows? Maybe he’ll cut a deal with Putin to re-insert some American troops into Syria for some joint action against… well, whoever isn’t Russian and can be easily labeled a terrorist.

There is definitely something conducive about the middle of the night to writing about the collapse of our Constitutional order. And having faced a little brush of mortality.

I came down with a fever and bad body aches the day before yesterday. I never experienced any upper respiratory symptoms, however, and the fever and aches passed within 48 hours. So I may have dodged the COVID bullet this time. I suppose I’ll consider getting a serology test now that I’ve actually had something that COULD have been the ‘Rona.

Feeling expansive from having survived another day of the pandemic and watched America refuse to be bullied by its own President, I’ll memorialize here a prediction I blurted out on Twitter the other day:

Laying down my marker now: #Biden will win ALL 50 states in #Election2020. Think that’s impossible? Tell me why. #MB#BlueWave2020

— #BlackLivesMatter🌊BlogForArizona🌊 (@BlogForArizona) June 14, 2020

Why do I believe that? I haven’t any idea.

I just have a feeling that things are going to get so bad that even the most obdurate Trumpist will have little choice but to face the reality that their idol has feet of clay. There will die-hard, bitter-enders, of course. Many. Far too many of them.

But they will not be enough to carry a single state.

Just a feeling. Kind of hope I’m wrong. Because that would indicate things have gone so bad on such a global scale that a year from now Republicans will be asking, “Trump who, now? Never heard of him… I have a call…”