A NOTE: I am gaining a bit of traction with these blogs. Over the past few days I’ve been visited by folk from the U.S. (obviously) but also the U.K., Spain, Canada, Germany, Norway, Italy, Poland, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, the Dominican Republic, N. Madedonia, Romania, Mexico, India, and the Ukraine. Hopefully, the Ukrainian visitor is not a Russian soldier invading that brave country but there you have it. I also have no idea whether they like what they read or not. Since my grasp of reality is tenuous at best, I’ll assume the best. [A quick positive note on that: Putin’s mercenaries, the Wagner Group, may be abandoning him.] Busy day today so only time for a rather quick thought.

Could anyone look at what remains of the Republican Party and not conclude that it has become a full-blown cult bent on establishing an autocracy or what would be called a dictatorship in polite society?

Apparently, Arizona’s Kari Lake is Trump’s front runner for the VP slot on his 2024 ticket. By way of reminder, she is the extreme MAGA enthusiast who, upon narrowly losing her race for the U.S. Senate, did the full-blown Trump rant of crying fraud and refusing to accept the results. Nothing like a complete loss of contact with reality to cement one’s credentials for high office.

I bring her up after reading that she has suggested the GOP dismiss all primaries and other traditional protocols for selecting their nominee and simply rally around their glorious leader … The Donald. The details of democracy are just so inconvenient when you wish to coronate a Supreme Leader, or establish yourself as his successor. Trump, for his part, has already said he will not debate any other nominees. He simply presumes he is the presumptive Fuhrer. After all, he won in 2020, and bigly (if you accept his delusions). Many of his rabid followers still believe he is running the country from Mar-A-lago with the fake media putting out lies about this Biden guy.

It was clear that The Donald always thirsted to subvert the checks and balances established by our Constitution and, in their place, assert total control. During his first time around the Ferris Wheel, he bristled at those who reminded him of the consraints he faced, firing many who would obey the law as opposed to his personal whims. He would have his Cabinet members heap personal praise on him at their rare gatherings as if he were a Middle-Eastern potentate and not a civilian chief executive. He yearned for a military parade marching down Penssylvania Avenue with he, the Supreme Leader, high above in the viewing stand, just as Communist Autocracy did for decades in Moscow on May Day. Didn’t he praise Putin and the other dictators around the globe while spurning NATO and our peer democracies?

He won’t be constrained if he were to get the brass ring a second time. He already has suggested a test for all Government employees and the firing of those who fail. Let me be clear on this. Such a review would be little more than a loyalty oath to Trump as the Supreme Leader. He would replace all Constitutional restraints, or try his damndest.

Would the reasonable members of his party hold him back, force some minimal acceptance of the rule of law on their leader? I would not hold my breath. While a few in the GOP have not gone over to the dark side and may retain reservations about their nominal head, most have evidenced little reluctance to support the pillars of democracy. They have crammed through Supreme Court Justices, employed transparent voter suppression tactics, enacted gerrymandered voting boundaries in local elections, and issued campaign ads that would have impressed Joseph Goebbels for their dishonesty and blatant misinformation. Power is all and they are in the game.

But he cannot win, right? Surely, a man that lost by 3 million votes (in the overall vote) in 2016 and 7 million the second time around, would be beaten soundly in 2024. No rational person could see a path by which Trump and Lake might weave their way through the electoral college, especially if he is in jail or house arrest for one or more of his felonies. After all, while Biden is doing a good job, even if he is old and not very exciting. Then again, Americans are childish enough to feel they must like their President. Really? We are not marrying the freaking person for crying out loud.

What worries me is something else, the stuff of nightmares. Even a boring Biden-Harris ticket should win IF …. there is not some catastrophe. What if Americans experience some form of existential threat? Remember, Hitler was yesterday’s news, a has been and never was, until the great depression brought Germany’s economy crashing down in the early 30s and unsettling civil strife between left and right coursed through their streets.

I am not one to give into flights of conspirital fancy (at least not before Trump came along) but here is something to think about. The one thing that might boost Trump’s chances in 2024 would be some kind of existential crisis. War might be one but people tend to rally around the current leader in that circumstance. A climactic disaster? No, that might be the same as war and besides, you can’t dial up one of those on demand. But what about an economic calamity of 1930’s proportions. That swept Hitler into poawer and the Republicans out of power for a generation while the political landscape in the U.S. was rewritten for another two generations.

But you cannot dial up one of those on demand either, or can you? The debt limit debate is nearing a crisis point. If we default, and apparently we have less than a month left before we run out of fiscal tricks, we face disaster. When America cannot pay its bills, you not only have an economic fallout of unimaginable proportions but you would shake the foundation of our trust in government. We assume our government will honor its debts. If it does not, if it betrays that trust, all bets are off and the very basis of even our currency is moot. It is not as if we back up our greenbacks with gold or precious metals. We back it up with a moral and, until now, inviolate guarantee … the backing of our national government.

Not even Republicans are so venal and evil that they would break the country, and destroy its credibility, just for a grab at power, right? Don’t be so sure. After all, they shut the government down in 1995, 1996, 2013, 2018, and 2019 for temporaty periods just to get their way. But they always backed off when, to their shock, the public missed government services even though the essential ones continued. These were not even ‘default’ shutdowns but merely inconveniences due to unpassed budget bills.

Default is magnitudes more important and consequential. Democrats cooperated with Republicans in raising the debt limit three times during Trump’s reign even though the spiking deficits were all about his efforts to shift trillions of dollars to the wealthy through egregious tax breaks. Dems would not endanger the country, or the globe, merely because of some selfish policies by their opponents. They care about the country and governing.

You might assume Republicans, at the end of the day, also would act responsibly. I so wish I could believe that. But letting the the U.S, default rayther than raise the debt ceiling would give them the crisis that might push Trump over the top in 2024. Desperate voters are not rational voters. Nor do they connect the dots well and blame the right people for their problems. And, if the GOP can get power just one more time, they just might unravel what remains of our experiment in ‘government of the people, for the people, and by the people.’ We might not get our democracy back for a very long time, if ever.

On that bright note, I’ll sign off for today, and likely for this weekend! But, like your favorite horror flic villain, I’ll be back.