The Fuse Likely To Set It Off

My last post was openly considering whether we're one step away from a Second American Civil War, with the realization we're more likely in the opening stages of it akin to a Cold War buildup before the powderkeg goes off and the shit gets real.

I mean, c'mon, there's already a Wiki page about Civil War 2: the Trumpening (and don't knock Wikipedia. It may be open-source where anybody can show up to edit, but it has standards and citation requirements to make it a reliable reference. It's just high school and college students who get lazy tend to copy and paste whole entries into their schoolwork and pass off that plagiarism as their own work as though teachers don't check for that with their Grammarly or TurnItIn databases. My mom was a teacher, and in the years before she retired she cursed Wikipedia because even her IB students were pulling that stunt. Anyway, I digress). While it's all talking about the hypotheticals, that article lists a serious number of incidents - most of them increasing in number ever since trump seized the national spotlight - that set up a solid argument that we're in the early stages of honest-to-Dog insurrection.

This is akin to the buildup to the First Civil War, throughout the 1850s when the political partisanship of the time - the fight over the Fugitive Slave Acts, Bleeding Kansas, the Sumner Caning, John Brown's raid -  led up to the final act of Abraham Lincoln's victory for the Presidency in 1860 that triggered half of the southern slave states to secede.

You can feel it: We are one final step from the "Cannons Firing on Fort Sumter" point of no return. The battle lines are drawn over the January 6th Insurrection and the recent extremist Supreme Court rulings. All it's going to take is one more nudge from the goddamn wingnuts and we will be quoting Fred Thompson's "We will be lucky to live through it" line until the shooting stops, and either the United States remains intact but with the conservatives shattered for 100 years or with the nation broken under an authoritarian bootheel. 

So what will it be then, what will be the match that starts the inferno?

I'd bet good money - okay, 50 bucks, I'm a librarian I'm not rich - it's going to involve donald trump freaking out in some way, and most likely over criminal charges that would interfere with his plans to retake the White House in 2024. Thing is, there's a number of separate criminal charges he's still facing.

The investigation trump has to fear most is the one in Georgia involving his attempts to pressure that state's Sec of State to "find me enough votes" to negate Biden's win there. There's a grand jury interviewing not only Raffensperger but several others, and the jury may yet get testimony out of several trumpian lackeys before it's done. The legal experts argue that this matter - where trump is caught on audio interfering with election results - is a clear violation of state and federal election laws, and given its straight-forward situation should be ruled on by the grand jury relatively soon.

The Select House Committee looking into the January 6th Insurrection has already produced a number of actionable grounds to charge trump on various federal felonies, not just incitement to insurrection but also wire fraud for milking $250 million out of his followers on a fundraising scam. Thing is, the committee can't charge trump directly... but they can refer the charges to the Justice Department. Then it becomes a question if Biden's Attorney General Merrick Garland decides to take it.

Either matter could take months if at all, but of the two the Georgia case threatens trump the most. It's a reason why rumors are coming out that trump wants to announce his 2024 campaign before August of this year, under the belief that prosecutors are reluctant to go after Presidential candidates out of fear of politicizing matters (trump would definitely scream that the criminal charges will interfere with the "people's right to vote for me").

Thing is, I doubt the Georgia DA will be intimidated by that. Given how much of trump's biggest criminal trespasses have been in the political arena, going after him on a political felony would be necessary. So I do expect the election interference/intimidation charges in Cobb County to go forward.

And that will be what triggers open war.

Even if trump doesn't stir up the shitstorm, the Far Right demagogues in the mainstream media and social media will. This will be, in their eyes, a blatant attempt by "them" - the evil libruls - to silence their Great Leader / Savior. 

I don't think it will drive Red state governors into secession mode, but it will send the gun-nut Proud Boys/Oathkeepers/Patriot Front/Brownshirt militias out into the streets to hit every easy target they can to express their rage. But then any attempt by Homeland Security or any law enforcement to shut the Far Right militias down will trigger Red state secession. 

This situation may seem avoidable if the prosecutors decide not to charge trump on any criminal matters. Problem with that is that everyone knows letting trump off the hook again - after all the other times he's been let go after every other bankrupting fraudulent act he's committed the past 50 years - will just embolden trump to pursue even darker criminal misdeeds. And the violence that follows in his wake will get worse anyway.

It's an unavoidable no-win either way. Better to hold trump accountable - at long last - and prepare for the storm that will hit us all.

Just be ready for it to be bad. Real bad. There has been 50-plus years of pent-up rage in the Far Right epistemic bubble: We've seen only bits of it here and there, at its worst with the Oklahoma City bombing and with all the gun violence just adding to the body count the last 20 years.

We will all be lucky to get through this. It's a slim hope, but it's all I have now.