MAGA Wakeup Call in Tulsa: 2020 is NOT 2016. Believe Otherwise and Trump Loses. Big.
Hindsight is often a devil’s elixir. Somewhere since the razor thin, fingernail-chewed miracle of Donald Trump’s unlikely 2016 victory, Trump’s base decided that he was invincible. Inevitable. Unbeatable. Ebullience of irrational exuberance that would make Wall Street blush with envy.
Trump won the 2016 contest by roughly 83,000 votes scattered fortuitously and perfectly over five swing states he was expected to lose, in an election with 55% turnout, the lowest in 35 years, pitted against the only pantsuited human being this side of Harvey Weinstein with higher negatives than Donald Trump. Truth.
That’s truth too hard to swallow for Trump cultists, who now lurch from the sublime to the absurd in cackling spasmodics of stupidity that have empowered the Trump inevitability myth and will likely ensure his defeat in November. His most ardent followers won’t hear of anything but Trump’s omnipotent and widening appeal. Because logic never intrudes on their analysis via heartstrings and fond wishes. Bless their little hearts. And even smaller brains.
Tulsa’s Saturday night should be a momentous wakeup call to reality. But it won’t be. An arena of 19,000 less than half full, trolled and deceived by an army of Tik-Tok foundlings, awash on a platform normally reserved for thirsty twerking, lip-synching THOTS in their thongs looking for clicks or licks or the cyber-kinetic pantomime of what passes for physical intimacy among the stunted, basement dwelling arrested development Eloi idiots in 2020. Organized by an Iowa Weather Underground grandmother, more than a million of the army of Tik-Tok sluts overwhelmed Trump’s digital infrastructure, making phony ticket reservations, vastly inflating perceived ticket demand and ensuring that actual Tulsa attendees would be swamped aside and denied authentic approval.
The tactic worked like a charm, likely foreshadowing coming attractions and sending further bitterness of shockwave through Trump’s relationship with campaign manager Brad Parscale, a social media penetration uber genius who with the imprisonment of Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, has now been Peter-Principled into a managerial role that exceeds his best gifts and splinters his attention from virtuoso mastering of social media microtargeting into realms he has no qualification or experience for, with predictable results. Neither Stone, nor Manafort would have been caught dead touting moonshot numbers of 1-million ticket requests prior to the event. Better to underpromise and overdeliver and let the camera tell the story. A rookie mistake.
Parscale, a social media wunderkind is in completely over his head as Trump’s campaign chief. But he won’t be for long…
Still, the blame for Trump’s faltering collapse in the moment is traceable to a thousand cuts, most self-inflicted, as either the President or his inner circle sought time and time again for messaging nuance that did more harm than good. Bumpstock bans. Red Flag gun confiscation. Flavored vape bans. For more than three years, Trump’s natural tendency toward authoritarian executive purview bit painfully and repeatedly into the most devoted portions of his ideological base. Sending shivers of questioned authenticity through the ranks and permanently souring a likely fatal sector of libertarian purists from ever supporting him again.
Only his flourish of Calvin Coolidge economic brilliance prevented a church split among his most devoted parishioners. And all of that was wiped away with the flick of a test tube in a Chinse laboratory. Deliberately. Strategically. Malevolently. A black swan to devour Trump’s golden goose and likely, derail his claim to a second term.
In painful hindsight, his keenest observers and indeed advisors may be left to wonder how the six dimensional chess mantra of cozying to the suburban “Karen” vote with happy talk on topics of hardline gun control, preemptive gun confiscation, free market interferences on flavored nicotine juice and all the rest juxtaposes in any way with the denial and nonsensical response to a COVID-19 virus that those same suburban housewives and their local hospitalist friends believe is real, deadly and to be taken seriously.
To date, 40 9/11 death tolls stacked end to end like cordwood. Downplayed, insulted, minimized again by Trump in Tulsa as a hoax. A cold. The sniffles. A narrative that is absolute lunacy to everyone but roughly 30% of Trump’s least educated base. And a slap in the face to those of us with friends and loved ones among the dead.
Maybe six dimensional chess is by the boards, right alongside cogent science and statistics.
Sadly, America resembles every other fallen empire in the waning moments of gasping twilight, fat, slovenly, intellectually undisciplined, hopelessly divided and rotten to the core with a swelling barbarian population convinced of both governmental virtue and omnipotence and demanding that those powers be obligated to ensure everything from housing to healthcare to monthly income and food. Venezuelan collapse teaches. And beckons, still.
Tearing at the historical edifice of the greatest and most prosperous society ever founded like fetid infants, wet with the greasy treacle of their own excrement and shrieking interminably to quell the madness of their upbringing and four decades of the best brainwashing money and the Communist John Dewey NEA can buy.
What the other side never realizes is that while they go to Tik-Tok in their scanty undies to besmirch mischief, their opponents will go to the root cellar and to the gun cabinet for a purge long overdue.
