All the World's a Staged Coup

Donald Trump is at heart a showman and a provocateur, so his purging of the Pentagon and his charges of election fraud and refusal to concede are probably just the latest clumsy tools in his bottomless "make me the center of attention" toy toolbox. Or so I'd been thinking.

But now that journalists whom I respect, such as David Sirota and the writers at the World Socialist Website, are laying out perfectly plausible scenarios for how an honest-to-goodness military coup and/or the overturning of election results by Republican legislatures in such key battleground states as Pennsylvania, to be later upheld by the right-wing Supreme Court, I'm beginning to have some uncomfortable second thoughts.

And the fact that the New York Times, heretofore the mainstream media champion of #Resistance, Inc, is downplaying the coup narrative and enlisting two of its top national security reporters (a/k/a CIA mouthpieces) to do so, also makes me wonder what is really up. As long as the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff remains in charge, the Times article reassures us, there is no possible way that the right-wing ideologues and cronies that Trump has appointed to key positions will have the power to do much at all.     

And while the Republicans are making their own big show of supporting a second term for Trump, behind the scenes they reportedly are making arrangements to brief the Biden transition team on classified national security and intelligence matters. This to the ultimate benefit of the Uniparty and the military-industrial complex which each faction so slavishly serves.

Meanwhile, even if and when his physical coup fails, Donald Trump will have won in the psychological warfare category. Isn't he just taking his own page from the Clinton campaign's "we wuz robbed" playbook? Two can play the government-in-exile game as easily as one. The Trumpian restoration movement is already a done deal, and Campaign 2024 will be in full throttle before you know it.

Not that the defeated president's mischief-making doesn't have a bright side. The powers-that-be are aghast, for example, that Trump might finally order all the troops home from Afghanistan after a two-decade occupation. He is threatening to declassify documents that allegedly prove beyond all reasonable doubt that Russiagate is the fictional product of the de facto CIA/DNC Partnership. He is threatening to fire Gina Haspel, the CIA director who not only destroyed tapes documenting Bush-era torture but who allegedly presided over some of the torture sessions herself. 

Even when Trump does ultimately leave office, the permanent security state fears that he will become a walking, talking Wikileaks, spilling all kinds of state secrets and chipping away at whatever legitimacy and public support they still enjoy. If they're not also fearfully mentioning that he might pardon Julian Assange, it is probably because they don't want to give him any more ideas on how to jeopardize their reputations and careers.

Isn't it nerve-wracking enough that Trump is considered a long shot to replace Alex Trebek on Jeopardy?

Here, though, is the bottom-up coup that the oligarchs and their bickering apparatchiks are really afraid of. (warning: contains strong but very refreshing language.)