collapse – Mid-Missouri John Brown Gun Club

Coup Update

Obviously, the Trump regime’s claims that the election was fraudulent are in and of themselves part of the coup. But this is the kind of deception that has been a continuous feature of Trump, so it’s not particularly compelling. But there’s a lot more than that going on.

Trump still has a path to legally winning the election thanks to the fact that states are not legally bound to respect the result of the vote. They may send electors that have agreed to vote for Trump even if the popular vote in their state favors Biden; these are commonly called “faithless electors”. If the accepted procedure for counting electoral votes is used, it looks like Biden would win with 303 electors, and Trump would get 232 electors. However, if the states where Biden won but the governor is a Republican send electors who favor Trump, then Trump gets 288 electors and Biden loses, with 247 electors. Please feel free to check my math!

The states where this could happen are: Arizona, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont. (Again, please check my work!) I waited to bring this up until I saw the mainstream media covering the issue because I didn’t want to give the Trumpies any ideas. Despite this being technically legal, we would consider this to be an obvious violation of the will of the people, and therefore an insurrection. Such an outcome would go to the Supreme Court; I have no idea how that would turn out, and the interim conditions in the US would be dire.

In addition, Trump has been firing military leaders and presumably replacing them with Trump regime loyalists. Specifically, he has removed Pentagon leadership (including Secretary of Defense Mark Esper) and two top Homeland Security officials. Esper did not back Trump’s desire to use active duty troops to quell uprisings in US cities, and Homeland Security has been used as a Trump goon squad at uprisings (includes ICE, FEMA, Border Patrol, Secret Service, and more).

So you can see that in addition to the standard flow of propaganda from the White House, they are also making material preparations for the coup, and it’s clear that the Trump regime is in an extremely good position to succeed. The only thing that can really stop a coup at this point is for almost all of the Republican political elite to reject the coup. That still seems likely at this point. Trump could also chicken out; right now, it looks like he can leave office and continue his con man lifestyle, but if he attempts a coup, the stakes become much higher.

Below, you’ll find the table I used for this. I assumed that states controlled by Democrats but won by Trump would not send faithless electors. Columns 3 and 4 are the electors if the accepted procedure is used. Columns 5 and 6 are if the Republican-controlled states that Biden won send the wrong electors.

State	Governor Party	Biden Electors	Trump Electors	Faithless Biden	Faithless Trump
Alabama	Rep		9		9
Alaska	Rep		3		3
Arizona	Rep	11			11
Arkansas	Rep		6		6
California	Dem	55		55
Colorado	Dem	9		9
Connecticut	Dem	7		7
Delaware	Dem	3		3
Florida	Rep		29		29
Georgia	Rep	16			16
Hawaii	Dem	4		4
Idaho	Rep		4		4
Illinois	Dem	20		20
Indiana	Rep		11		11
Iowa	Rep		6		6
Kansas	Dem		6		6
Kentucky	Dem		8		8
Louisiana	Dem		8		8
Maine	Dem	3	1	3	1
Maryland	Rep	10			10
Massachusetts	Rep	11			11
Michigan	Dem	16		16
Minnesota	Dem	10		10
Mississippi	Rep		6		6
Missouri	Rep		10		10
Montana	Dem		3		3
Nebraska	Rep	1	4	0	5
Nevada	Dem	6		6
New Hampshire	Rep	4			4
New Jersey	Dem	14		14
New Mexico	Dem	5		5
New York	Dem	29		29
North Carolina	Dem		15		15
North Dakota	Rep		3		3
Ohio	Rep		18		18
Oklahoma	Rep		7		7
Oregon	Dem	7		7
Pennsylvania	Dem	20		20
Rhode Island	Dem	4		4
South Carolina	Rep		9		9
South Dakota	Rep		3		3
Tennessee	Rep		11		11
Texas	Rep		38		38
Utah	Rep		6		6
Vermont	Rep	3			3
Virginia	Dem	13		13
Washington	Dem	12		12
West Virginia	Rep		5		5
Wisconsin	Dem	10		10
Wyoming	Rep		3		3
TOTALS		303	232	247	288

Accepted procedure case vs. Faithless electors case

2020 Election

Here’s a brief summary of what’s going on with the 2020 US Presidential election.

There’s no chance that Donald Trump will accept the outcome of the election if Joe Biden wins.

Trump could win “legitimately” (to the extent that a legitimate win is possible with the electoral college system), but here is the most likely scenario:

The election outcome will be close, and because Democrats are slightly more likely to vote by mail, the odds are extremely high that the day after the election, Donald Trump will have more electors than Joe Biden. Trump will claim victory, but the count will continue.

At this point, Trump will lean into his claims that mail in ballots are being used to steal the election. Over the following week, those mail-in ballots will reveal that Joe Biden has won more electors. However, Trump and his followers will reject that information — they’ve been primed to do so by Trump himself. That’s the whole reason he’s been doing it, and his followers understand that.

Most Democrats are claiming that this will be the end of the controversy — Biden has won, and so on January 20, Biden will take office and Trump will be physically removed. That’s not how this is going to go at all.

Instead, Trump will be working every possible angle to create excuses for Republican-held states to reject the outcome of their state’s votes. Even if Biden has the popular vote and the electoral college by virtue of those votes, the states can reject the popular vote in their state and send a different set of electors that support Trump. This has happened in the US before, and it is completely legal for a state legislature to choose the electors for their state rather than leaving it to the voters. Republicans will say this is just because the mail-in ballots are tainted.

Then, Mike Pence will announce that Trump has been elected based on the electoral certificates that he decides are worthy to count. Trump will have stolen the election, but it will all be perfectly legal. There certainly might be an extended bureaucratic tussle at this point involving the House of Representatives and the courts, up to and including the Supreme Court (which is Trump’s primary motivation for rushing confirmation of his new Justice).

I’m going to try not to editorialize too much, but it really comes down to how much disruption the Republicans are willing to create (total) and how much disruption the Democrats are willing to tolerate (very little). In terms of state violence as a solution, the military has already vowed to stay out of it, and US law enforcement backs Trump. It really appears as if the Trump regime has the upper hand.

Even if Trump loses the game, it’s very unlikely that he will be escorted out of the White House. If it looks like Trump’s gambit won’t pay off, he will attempt to escape to Russia with his family members. He’ll move millions of dollars into Russian banks before that, so US intelligence will see it coming, but they won’t be able to stop him from leaving because he will still be President at that time — he might even fly there on Airforce One.

Here’s a much more in-depth narrative about the problem that this election presents:

The Election That Could Break America
If the vote is close, Donald Trump could easily throw the election into chaos and subvert the result. Who will stop him?
by Barton Gellman, The Atlantic

What Collapse Looks Like

In his recent piece posted on Medium, writer Indi Samarajiva describes his life in Sri Lanka during the civil war that lasted from 1983 to 2009. As with most modern conflicts, the root of it was western interference (in this case, British colonialism) and there is reason to believe that the US and UK were complicit in genocide against the Tamil people (who lost the war). However, the most interesting aspect of that period from the perspective of a person living in the US today, is that life just kept going for the most part — if you were not directly affected by the war, and most people were not.

I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There.
How life goes on, surrounded by death
by Indi Samarajiva, a writer living in Colombo, Sri Lanka

“I went to work, I went out, I dated. This is what Americans don’t understand. They’re waiting to get personally punched in the face while ash falls from the sky. That’s not how it happens. This is how it happens. Precisely what you’re feeling now. The numbing litany of bad news. The ever rising outrages. People suffering, dying, and protesting all around you, while you think about dinner. If you’re trying to carry on while people around you die, your society is not collapsing. It’s already fallen down.”

There are at least a couple of aspects to our collapse today in the US. The most obvious at this moment might be COVID-19 which has killed over 200,000 Americans, left possibly 2 million with permanent health issues, and sent US politics into a tailspin. But thanks to the already-existing divide between the near-right Democratic party and the far-right Republican party, and their mutual love of licking boots, there are many other things to worry about in the US today, and we’d be collapsing even without this new virus. This will get much worse before it gets better.