Trump's Army Won't Unilaterally Disarm

by Deacon Blues

It wasn’t that long ago that many critics bemoaned the prospect of a boring and preordained 2016 presidential race, with a Clinton and a Bush duking it out for the White House. Well, those days are long gone. We’re now more likely to have great uncertainty over who will occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in late January 2017, and sometime before it’s over, many may wish for a boring Clinton or Bush outcome.

Who exactly are the Trump supporters? Evan Osnos of the New Yorker spent months following Trump and talking with his supporters, and tells us:

Ever since the Tea Party’s peak, in 2010, and its fade, citizens on the American far right—Patriot militias, border vigilantes, white supremacists—have searched for a standard-bearer, and now they’d found him.

So the GOP is about to reap the extremist calamity it has sown all during the Obama presidency. At a time when the GOP is at risk of becoming a real fringe party of right-wing whites only, their rhetoric has ensured that anti-immigration sentiment is their newest litmus test, wrongly blaming brown people for what in fact Wall Street and globalization have done to the middle class.

But what happens when the Rupert Murdoch’s and the Koch Brothers and the Bush 100 conspire over the coming weeks to drive Trump from the race? What happens when Trump and his supporters go into open warfare to fight back? And what happens when this band of fringe misfits realize that the GOP establishment wants to take away their candidate once again and demand they play ball with the chosen one?

On the Democratic side, let’s play out what is likely to happen. Joe Biden will jump into the race because he believes Hillary is mortally wounded, and because deep down the White House doesn't want Obama's legacy to be tied to Hillary. Support for Hillary inside the party starts eroding and switching to Biden, even though Hillary in a three-way race wins in every scenario. But the media smells Clinton blood in the water, yes blood that Hillary herself put there but blood nonetheless, and they ramp up the drumbeat over the emails and pay attention to nothing else. So by next spring, the party’s offerings consist of Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden against a GOP civil war and eventual Trump third-party bid, with Hillary damaged and counted out as being supposedly unelectable.

So much for boring and preordained.