Trump, COVID-19, the Election, and Planned Chaos
By Steven Jonas
The argument presented in this column is entirely hypothetical. I do not have access to any “inside” information that would prove it to be true. But it might be. For, as the tapes presented in Bob Woodward’s book, Trump did understand the nature of the coming onslaught, very well. And if so, why did he respond to it the way he did? For if he had adopted standard public health measures at the beginning, he likely would have been on the glide-path to re-election. But obviously he didn’t see it that way, even if he did indeed understand the biology and the epidemiology of the disease.
Among the answers to the “why did he do what he did” question have been stupidity, rigidity, “concern with the market,” my own “magical thinking” explanation, political insularity, and so forth. This column presents another possible explanation: that back in January, Trump and his closest advisors (like his son, son-in-law, Bill Barr, Rudy Giuliani, and Stephen Miller), focused entirely on his chances for re-election, had for a variety of reasons unknown to the outside world concluded that as things stood then his chances of winning were not great. And thus they consciously came up with the “Chaos Strategy” that I describe below, as providing his only path to victory.
So far, they have certainly managed to create chaos, on a variety of fronts. Right now, the chances of its working electorally do not seem too good. But a major part of the strategy is of course to create chaos in the voting and the vote-counting. The implementation of that part of it is clearly underway. In terms of achieving success in the sense that Trump would actually “win” the election in the conventional sense, well no (or hell, NO). But could he remain in the Presidency after noon on Jan. 20, 2021, through the implementation of a set of legal and extra-legal measures that can be lumped together under the rubric of “Stealing the Vote,” that is very much still possible. And so, to the presentation of the hypothesis.
What has happened this year under Trump, vis-à-vis the COVID19 pandemic (to which I refer as the Trumpidemic2020[C]) and the Trump response to it, the impending Presidential election and the Trump response to it, seem to be random events, totally unrelated to each other. Of course, the timing of this particular pandemic was indeed a random event. Pandemics do occur regularly and have throughout human history. But their nature, timing, and intensity are random. On the surface, Trump’s response to it, which has been chronicled in my columns and many, many other places since the impending disaster first made itself known in this country in January, 2020 has been seemingly random, based on Trump’s idiocy and etc.
The response in terms of the nation’s health has been particularly ineffective, compared with that in virtually every other developed country (other than Sweden). In fact, the Trumpian response has been disease-generative. Second in terms of responses has been what I have characterized by Bill Barr’s drive towards fascism and Trump’s “useful idiot” role in it, certainly reinforced by the nationwide focus on finally coming to terms with the national blight of institutional racism. This set of events and the Barr-generated Federal response to it play right into Trump’s own obvious fascination with dictatorship. Finally, there is the also obvious Trump/Republican planning to suppress the vote and disrupt the balloting-and-counting-of-them for the election (Greg Palast: How Trump Stole 2020).
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Source: OpEdNews.com