In the wee small hours on an October 2022 night in San Francisco an octogenarian named Paul Pelosi answered his doorbell. He was greeted by a hammer wielder who bashed his head while asking "Where is Nancy?". Nancy, Paul's wife, was not home. Possibly she was on the other side of the country, in Washington, where she was the then Speaker of the House of Representatives (an office which is something akin to a Prime Minister in a parliamentary setup). Like Mike Pence, who escaped a hanging in 2021, she has - so far - survived. After some days in hospital, Paul did too.

Pence, the previous Vice President, you'll remember, had been targeted because he would not annul the 2020 election result and declare his boss had won. He was villainous in the eyes of Donald Trump, who demands grovelling obedience from his minions. Pelosi was the intended target this time because she is a Democrat, which is a dangerous association to have these days in America.

There was no rational reason to pick out Pelosi as deserving of a violent death more than any of her colleagues, her political life being entirely conventional. Which is why she was Speaker. Besides belonging to the wrong team, her only crime was to be, like Hillary Clinton - who used to be the focus of Trumperian rage - a woman.

About half of all Americans are Democrats, or support the Democrats, which is perennially the largest political party in the country. Both the main parties have been around from the start of independent America so any attempt to deem one of them as illegitimate cannot succeed. Unless the purpose is to create ungovernability. Recent Presidents to sport the label include Hillary's husband Bill and Barack Obama. Among other Democratic Presidents were Roosevelt (FDR) and Kennedy (JFK) whose reputations are central in American mythology, comparable, let's say, to the hold over New Zealanders' sense of identity of King Dick Seddon and Michael Joseph Savage.

A traditional Republican Party (GOP - Grand Old Party) might have thought the incident serious, even alarming, but not the present lot. They preferred reactions along the lines that they had deployed after the 2021 attempted coup. The attack was nothing too serious. Or, an opposite tack, the intruder was OK because - as one of them explained - the Pelosis had it coming. They are "evil motherfuckers".

In the short two years since the insurrection in Washington, violence against politicians has soared. Election workers who counted the votes last time have been threatened and abused. Violence of all kinds is soaring. The hammering intruder, who turned out to be an illegal Canadian overstayer, had been roused by the spike in mad and violent talk inspired by the imminent election.

The 2022 Midterm Elections

Welcome to the 2022 midterms, in which all Congressional seats (with a two-year term) and some Senate seats (with a six-year term) were contested. This pattern was devised by the Founding Fathers to keep the localities which were distant from the power centres, and therefore potentially loose cannons, short of ammunition lest they press for radical measures.

With only two years until they next face the electorate, Congressional reps have little space to achieve change, and the staggered dates mean that the sort of clear mandate that the parliamentary system can deliver is elusive in America. That was always been the intent of the powerful vested interests. The diffusion of public power is reinforced by the federal set up, in which responsibilities are spread.

Midterm elections, held every four years between Presidential elections, typically boost the party which does not hold the Presidency. It's a keep-the-rogues honest mindset (further reinforcing public immobility). Given that prior to the vote polls showed that Biden is unpopular (mostly because Republicans have blocked his initiatives) the expectation leading into the November 2022 election was that the Republicans would make big gains in the House and that the Senate would be a toss-up.

It turned out that the Democrats did better than expected, losing only a few Congressional seats, while the Senate looks to be close to what it had been - a 50/50 deadlock (one key result was unresolved at the time of writing). Approaching the early November poll there was consensus that there were three closely contested states in which the fate of the state's representations would be decided.

Of GOP candidates involved, one had already announced that she would accept the result only if she was said to have won; another aspirant was shown repeatedly during the campaign to be a liar, a hypocrite and a moron, and the third was held to be rude and extreme and phony (two narrowly lost. The third result was unknown when we went to press). All of this particular trio were identified as being personally unpopular, even within Republican circles, but these days they don't care about such outmoded concepts as good manners. It's all tribal. In the land which gave us "Presidential" politics, with its emphasis on individual qualities, personal integrity, charm or character were now irrelevant.

What had not changed from the bad old days of the likes of the supposedly likeable Ronald Reagan and the Bushes - who come across now as positively moderate in comparison with present pathologies - was that none of the candidates offered anything in the way of policy specifics. Republicans never do, either because they don't have a clue or because to announce anything concrete would allow (traditional) media and voters to ask questions. Better to stick to emotive generalisations and dog whistles about "crime" and "law and order" - while endorsing gun violence.

Culture Wars & Crude Stunts

If there is no handy news to exploit, if no young Afro-American man has had to be shot by the police, or no Democrat has talked about "critical race theory", the threats to Republican virtue have to be contrived. In a typical instance in September, as campaigning revved up, Ron DeSantis, the Governor of Florida, where businesses are struggling with a lack of workers, loaded a bus with asylum seekers and sent them off to a resort island off the coast of Massachusetts. There are no cities in Martha's Vineyard, and, with summer waning, the few tourism jobs that might have been available were closing down. So, as policy, the trip made zero sense.

But the trip was not about jobs or settling migrants. It was about politics. In American mythology Massachusetts is seen as the quintessentially liberal state, chock full of "elitists" and "liberals" like the Kennedys, who bach on the mainland coast opposite the island. Martha's Vineyard is perhaps best known in US political circles as the place where Edward Kennedy, younger brother of JFK, drove off a bridge and drowned one of his staff. Up till then Ted, the local senator, had been touted as a likely future President. DeSantis might well have calculated that the scene of a failed Democratic bid was just the place to propel his own Presidential ambitions.

Because the absurd bus trip was about the next Presidential election in 2024. DeSantis' stunt could not be considered to have any rational justification. He might not have wanted to provide staff for struggling businesses in his own state, figuring he would always win Florida, but he could have sent the bus to Boston, just an hour away from the island. But that could (if improbably) have been seen as an honest attempt to help. No, the gesture needed to be crude.

DeSantis was signalling that he was not about to follow the wimpy footsteps of Republicans like Reagan or the Bushes, who would have drivelled on about welcoming Central Americans from despotism. Many of the bus passengers were from Venezuela and Nicaragua, fleeing regimes that America hated. They were not Mexican rapists. They could have been portrayed as freedom seekers. So why did the Governor want to give the impression that they were just more Latin misfits?

It was all about the culture wars. Florida - and Texas, whose Governor was playing the same hand - are border states, bearing the burden of all the people crossing into America from the south and the Democrats in their northern and coastal sanctuaries were portrayed as doing nothing to stop them. So, unlike traditional Republicans (and Democrats) who staked out boundaries based on Cold War dualities like "democracy" versus "communism", the age of Trump called for the demonisation of immigrants and refugees per se.

When it comes to the entry of people from poorer countries who needed to be exploited, whether it was those swarthy Italians or primitive Irish or "cosmopolitan" Jews, prejudice based on religion, race and ethnicity had always misinformed policy. But in the era of Trump and DeSantis (whose name has a Hispanic ring) it has become the one essential. If you want voters to fear and despise migrants, you need to demonise the very concept of immigration. It is an entirely hypocritical posture. The border states, whether red or blue, depend on a constant flow of cheap labour.

Misogyny, Racism & Gerrymandering

There had been no timely scandal or crisis to precipitate a culture war on asylum seekers, which is why DeSantis contrived his folly. But earlier in the year, when the Supreme Court ruled that Roe versus Wade was unconstitutional, the Republicans were handed a weapon of mass destruction. Or so some of them supposed. The ruling meant that it now was up to the states to decide if women had the right to an abortion, it was said and, immediately, red states began passing a series of restrictions on the right to terminate a pregnancy.

Granting powers to local states rather than the federal Government has always been a core ethic among American conservatives, with their doctrines of "small government", and the annulment of Roe v Wade, which had guaranteed the right of privacy, presented the opportunity for a series of skirmishes to keep the culture wars firing. But this was not enough for some in the Senate, where Lindsey Graham, an influential reactionary, proposed a federal ban on all abortions after 15 weeks.

Not only did this idea contradict the "states rights" ideology - it's harder to imagine how a government in a supposedly modern democracy could be any bigger than to demand the power to control people's bodies - but it enraged a fair slice of opinion, and not just of women. It seemed that the Republicans might be splitting. Perhaps some of them actually believed in individual choice over personal health and wellbeing. Or was it just that the Democrats seemed to be gaining ground and the Party needed to find a more likely battle front?

Hostility towards women and people whose skin is not white has been a permanent American theme (and elsewhere in the world, of course). Then there is the long sad history of suppression of all Afro-Americans. In electoral politics this is achieved through gerrymandering, the manipulation of boundaries, often grotesquely, so that black voters, likely Democrats, are lumped together and white voters, likely Republicans, are grouped so that they can eke out small majorities.

Lest this old practice was no longer enough, state officials have more recently enacted detailed measures to keep people at home on election day by reducing the number of polling places and ways of voting and requiring (unnecessary) means of identification which poor blacks might not have. Vote suppression has been a successful fraud as Democrats almost always have a majority across the whole country which is often not reflected in the Government.

Elections are permanently rigged and are likely to be increasingly so because at state and city level politicians, not civil servants, make the rules. GOP candidates have always relied on getting people to turn off politics so that they do not vote. Until recently this has been explicit, with candidates getting advice as to how best to disgust citizens. In the era of Trumpery these lessons are no longer needed. Their wisdom is taken for granted.

The culture wars have been won. Just a few months back GOP propagandists were prattling on about which people should use which toilets, hoping that the Democrats would go woke and argue back about gender and sex. This would have built a huge GOP landslide. But there was no way someone like Joe Biden, a conservative Catholic, would oblige. In NZ terms the Democrats are akin to Labour or National. They are not anarchist or feminist culture warriors.

In a rational ethos, the antics of the extreme Right would have swung hard the other way, bestowing Biden's lot large majorities. In defending the right of migrants to apply for residence, or the right of women to terminate, or the ability of Afro-Americans to vote in districts with the same ease as those who live in leafy rich suburbs, Democrats did not have to fight culture wars as such. They were merely continuing conventional processes and upholding the ethic of universal rights.

America, like similar countries - Canada, the UK and NZ for example - had been becoming more tolerant, and less superstitious. For Trumpery, this is what's stopping America from Being Great Again. Measures like the civil rights laws from the 1960s and Roe v Wade from the next decade were the problem. Enter Trumpery with its sense that conventional processes and universal rights had to go.

Trump Really Is As Stupid As He Appears

Trump himself has been so successful because he's the real deal. He is as stupid, ignorant, foul and reactionary as he appears. Unlike many other would-be tyrants who have been restrained by having to operate within a liberal democracy, he does not have to act the part. His other key vice has been his total selfishness. Has any public figure from the Anglosphere so obviously and completely thought only of his own personal interests? Trumpery's followers are sure that good manners or social decency will never hamper their guy.

Trumpery had been enabled by the neoliberal takeover of major economies (with NZ very much included) of the 1980s and 90s, a time when Rightist politicians liked to say things like "if it isn't broken, break it". They were thinking of matters economic and financial, wanting to free capital from any moderation that social democracy or trade unionism might impose on its need to plunder and exploit.

Some of the neoliberals back then, who sensed their time was coming, would have been racist or sexist (or whatever) but the ideology is in itself not about social culture. It's about individual - and corporate - freedom. Trumpery has assumed its tenets and does not talk about them unless, for immediate tactical reasons, it has to pretend to a populist resistance to big business, in whose interests it really exists. It is noteworthy that Trump himself has hardly ventured any public remarks about economic policy for some years, and did so only briefly when he held his rallies.

First, that is, came the neoliberal revolution, notably during the Reagan period; then, that installed, followed the drive that has culminated in Trumpery. The key manifestation of both, the one that cannot be mentioned in impolite company, is the rush into inequality that both sought. Talking "culture", a symptom, diverts attention from the cause of America's current ugliness - the massive transfer of wealth from the 90%, aided by a collaborating class of ten per centers, to the one per centers.

Neither of the parties in the USA is going to challenge this reality any more than the parties in the NZ Parliament are going to challenge the same trend here. The midterms were about how to react to the symptoms. Until recently the Republican Party was all about protecting the rich. It still is, but the ten percenters, managers and professionals, a demographic that often retains the values and styles of previous decades, these days are likely as not to go with the Democrats, who offer business as usual capitalism. Now that it has been engulfed by Trumpery, the GOP stands for civil chaos in the cause of Reaction.

Elections are usually dominated by economic issues, yet this time round, with inflation in the background and experts predicting recession, Reaction at first had little to say beyond routine and vague swipes at the Democrats. The GOP offered no specifics because it could not encourage a reasoned airing of policy options. The Republicans voted unanimously against Biden's infrastructure investment, making it hard for them to claim that they were there for Main Street, as the cliche labels working America.

Ever since Trumpery first rampaged seven years ago, I have argued that its impulse was not - as commentators of various shades kept repeating - about responding to the withering away of small-town America. Years too late the conventional wisdom accepts that the (publicly declared) battlefronts are about culture because they are more accessible than economic themes to unreason and emotion. The assaults on industrial America by globalised neoliberalism were waged by both political parties and to vote Republican because you did not care for Hillary Clinton's persona made no sense.

When Biden became President the leader of the Republicans in the House of Representatives was Liz Cheney from deep red Wyoming. Cheney has never been anything but a very conservative Republican in the traditional mould. Yet she is also morally decent and principled, opposing Trumpery's "big lie" of a stolen election and unfazed that it cost her first her role as Speaker in Congress and then a primary vote in her state. If Trump were to become the Party's candidate again, she says, she will support the Democrats. And just before election day she actually endorsed some Democratic candidates. This background is relevant in that she voted with Trumpery against the Democrats' stimulus.

When it comes to the economy, all Reaction unites. More sophisticated Republicans, like Cheney, know that the class war, not the culture wars, is what matters. The GOP has never offered its Middle America supporters anything real, because its enablers, super rich donors, don't want it to. So, it has to divert attention from this basic fact through rhetoric to stir cultural resentment and hate. The overriding need for any GOP politician is to retain lobbyists' money to fund the next election campaign. Coal and oil interests hugely boost the GOP, which is one of the main reasons the world is burning. Democrats depend on corporate sources too, but not so much on the climate war deniers.

To make the pretence superficially plausible, the billionaires' tools assume the appearance of simple folk. Trumpery has (im)perfected the Republican conceit of decrying "politics" to blind their supporters to the insight that in fact they are only about politics. Their interest is in wielding power. They're there to be there.

To claim a distaste for "politics" is the time dishonoured posture of populists and pragmatists. They brand themselves as practical no-nonsense types who have to ride into town every so often to clean out the professional time servers (they might have had a point if by that they wish to decry the modern practice of going straight into political work as a first job in life. But that is not what they mean).

This falseness has never been so crude as it is in contemporary America, where, over decades, Senators say or do anything which will keep them in Washington, no matter how overt are the contradictions and hypocrisies involved. GOP Congressional leaders like Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham come to mind. Both went from condemning the attempted putsch in January 2021 to endorsing it when it became clear that Trumpery had created a new unreality which insists that daily life is nothing but a zero-sum war between the cultures. Because what does the Trumpery GOP stand for apart from hatred of women, non-whites, blacks, the poor, "liberals" ... and an admiration for foreign dictators?

Unspoken Project To Destroy Democracy

Usually offstage are the billionaires, protected by Trumpery's diversions, whose unspoken project is to destroy democracy, because democracy threatens to allow civilised behaviour and the possibility of enhanced life chances for ordinary people. In the short-term civility could reduce profits a tiny bit. In a longer term an informed and coherent public would threaten the one per centers' hegemony.

But the pretence that Trumpery's thugs and dupes are the enemies of the political is more apt than they might have known. My dictionary reports that for a person to be "politic" is to be "sagacious, prudent, judicious, expedient". That doesn't sound like the Proud Boys. So, in a sense, Trumpery's mobs are accurate. They are hostile to the politic of good manners and civilised conventions. To succeed they have to be.

The question around November's vote has been partially answered: Would it enable the formal destruction of American democracy? Since January 2021, when Pence escaped being strung up, it had become clear that Republicans at all levels from Trump on down had planned to destroy democracy in the manner of how American governments, both red and blue, have always installed compliant dictators in the poor world countries that they refer to as "banana republics". Trumpery makes no distinction between Central and domestic America.

To get there the misinformation and disinformation, the lies and the conspiracy theories, have worked a treat. With few paying attention to what is real and important, the GOP recruited candidates of limited ability and unlimited ambition. A majority were 2020 election deniers, believing - or saying that they believed - that Biden "stole" the election (though it's odd that he allowed them to win). So, the assault on fact and rationality is open and specific. If they can get away with it, the Republicans will install themselves as dictators by passing laws at state and federal level that transfer the authority to enact public policy from state agencies, civil servants and independent courts to partisan lackeys.

Like DeSantis' bussed migrants' fiasco, the threats have been clear. A comparable signal, one of many, is a red state's law that forbids giving food or water to would be voters in a queue that had been contrived to be long and arduous. That is pure repression without a plausible rationale. That swaggering arrogance, that up-your's aggression, is what is new and ominous. Dog whistles? No, more like elephant trumpeting (NZ went to the same place in 1951 when it was illegal to feed or shelter locked out watersiders).

A vote for the Republicans in November was a vote for autocracy. Just like Russia, where a fragile democracy morphed into Putin's tyranny. Except that America has been a democracy since its War of Independence. Speaking of Putin, what would he have done had he been faced with domestic opponents like the fascists in Washington?

What would his mate Trump have done had the rebellion been waged by "liberals" and "elitists" against him? They would be either dead or in a life sentence in jail. What sanctions, if any, await America's terrorists? So far, a handful have been convicted. Will the rest of them continue to walk the streets free? If so, it's virtually certain they'll have another go at igniting a civil war, whether or not with the direct assistance of the incoming Government.

Because They Are Fascists

Some commentators have excused Trumpery from the charge on technical grounds, saying that the environment in America, being a constitutional democracy, is not the same as, say, Germany in 1933 or Iran in 2022. But that does not exempt Trump. It's his motivations, actions and policies that matter, and they are all fascistic.

The assault in 2021 was directed by Trump in person and led by self-declared Nazis. As an attack on democracy, it was grosser than Hitler's first, failed coup, which was staged in a pub in Munich, not the Reichstag in Berlin. When he became Chancellor, it was after an election at which the Nazis attracted much less support than today's Republicans enjoy. Hitler was installed at the invitation of Germany's conservative parties, whose leaders thought the ranting Austrian was a hick they could control. That is reminiscent of the Republican Establishment's views about Trump in 2015, when he announced his candidacy.

The Nazis takeover was a fluke. They lucked into a time of national trauma, a moment of temporary popularity, and a tactically inept cast of characters among existing elites. Compare that to Trumpery, the expression of an established and explicit tradition in a country that had not just lost a world war or been ravaged by economic collapse.

Fascism is not just about bigotry and violence. The extremist mindset tends towards unreality, and not just in its warped values. Fascist ideology has a penchant for mysticism, for irrationality of various kinds. This is not surprising. When a society is reeling from a disaster for which they are unprepared and have no explanations, people invent scapegoats to soothe minds and nerves. But now, in 2022? Three centuries after the Enlightenment? And aren't we meant to learn from history? Germans in the years after the First World War had few experiences to guide them and no habit of democracy. Everyone was making it up as they went along.

A hundred years ago Germans were struggling to adapt to modernity, unlike postmodern America today, which is the richest and most technologically advanced nation ever, a place where citizens can go into a book shop and buy a history or a biography or a novel by a Nobel Prize winner, a place where they can look at their phones and have instant access to billions of true facts. And it elects chaos and pollution and hatred and a Government which declares itself illegitimate. It's been called "learned ignorance".

Trumpery's focus worked. In contrast the Democrats seemed to not coalesce around a strategy to counter the GOP's simple and false message. Abortion rights or the economy or the "big lie"? Or should they emphasise the threat to democracy? Beyond their core constituencies, few in the population at large cared about that, either because they had learned to ignore "liberal elites" or because they did not think their lives would be damaged by having to live under a dictatorship. It might even improve daily life. Didn't Mussolini get credit for making the trains run on time?

The GOP eventually got round to some resemblance to old style campaigning, settling on the economy as the issue to push. Polls indicated that for the electorate it was by far the most pressing matter. As it usually is. So, they blamed Biden for inflation, without saying how he had caused it or what they would do differently. This tends to be the way elections always go in the Anglosphere but now it was about the only straw to grasp blowing around in the real world.

The result: Americans in their hundreds of millions voted for a Party that has repeatedly shown that it will do nothing to alleviate the lives of the 90%. Judging by the record of the outgoing Government, every Republican will vote against every such measure. They will slash social security and Medicare. They will cut taxes for the super-rich. And lots of middle-and-lower-income earners thought that's just fine because they weren't Nancy Pelosi. So, the GOP campaign to damp down expectations and raise distrust and division and offer instead conspiracy and lies has been a great success.

What Else Might We Expect?

Nothing will be done to help Struggle Street. On the contrary. Nothing will be done to combat climate change. Indeed, they will try to reverse course. They might try to impeach Biden on Trumped up charges. Support for Ukraine might wobble. Some Republicans like Putin for his bully boy style; some on the extreme edge of the extremists see Russia as the last refuge for an all-white Europe, free from the brown and black contamination of western Europe; and there might be adherents to the Steve Bannon ethic of global chaos who welcome the carnage (see below). We won't ever know. None of these impulses can be publicly notified.

Most importantly for Mitch McConnell and Liz Cheney, on election day Wall Street rallied on the prospect of GOP gains. As one commentator explained, there should be gridlock in Congress, meaning that the federal Government won't be able to up its spending. In other words, Government inaction means untrammelled corporate profiteering. That's small government for you.

With legions of federal politicians still denying the result of the 2020 election, some of them in key battleground states, the prospect is that their side will win next time no matter what the election result actually is because in red states unbiased civil servants doing a routine job of counting the ballots will have been replaced by conspiracists and election deniers. In some states that particular contrivance might have run its course. No matter. Other opportunities will emerge as the forces of misinformation regroup.

Who will stop the rot? The Supreme Court, the one intended to protect the Constitution, the one that might soon be composed of only Trumpery's deniers? The police? The army? Judges? They too stand to be in the hands of Trumpery's tools. Checks and balances? Trumpery's project is to check them out. They are the barrier to the fascistic dictatorship that they hope to install in the 2024 Presidential election.

Some in Trumpery's inner circle, like Bannon (recently sentenced to prison but on bail pending appeal), want an international revolution. They want all existing conventions of conducting public affairs thrown out, to be replaced by a global anarchic capitalism. And now that the creepy Elon Musk has bought Twitter we face the prospect of a billionaires-cum-neofascist hegemony over (anti)social media.

To Trump's dismay, DeSantis won handily in Florida. Just days before the vote he rallied, so Trump held a rival event at the same time - for Trump, who was not a candidate - at which he mocked DeSantis, whose crime was to be seen as a likely rival of the great man to be the GOP Presidential candidate next time round. Me, me, me, says the orange man. DeSantis might not have minded because at the time TV was running an ad which pointed out that God had put him in the governorship. If God and bigotry back you, you can't lose.

Two More Years Of Assault On Civilised Democracy

The next two years are virtually certain to see a further steep increase in physical and rhetorical violence as Trumpery steps up its efforts to oust civilised democracy. All revolutionaries aim to render the status quo unviable. Trumpery intends to seize all power by discrediting, intimidating and, as opportunity allows, even actually taking up arms against the state. When the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers talk of civil war, they speak literally.

Beyond being extremists the neoliberals in NZ who gave us Rogernomics had nothing in common with Trumpery. Lange's outfit concentrated on finance and economics. They were not about culture wars or irrationality. Yet the Rogernomes have been called "Bolsheviks of the Right" in that they emulated, sometimes consciously, the tactics of Lenin in Russia in 1917, when he kept opponents off balance so that he could position his Bolsheviks to assume total power.

Which they did. As did Roger Douglas (in their very different way, both the Leninists and the Douglasites can be seen as erring in the opposite extreme from random and anti-intellectual Trumpery, both defining themselves in strictly consistent theoretical terms, not allowing pragmatic adjustments when things went wrong).

Borrowing this conceit, the midterms can be seen as February 1917, when the Tsar was deposed and a social democratic government took over tentatively until it was swept away by the Communists in October. As with the interim Russian government of Kerensky, which was deposed mostly because it could not get the numbers for decisive action, it won't be direct violence that threatens the status quo so much as inertia and confusion. Is 2022 America's February? Will 2024 be its October?

The orange buffoon himself might not be the candidate, if only because he might finally be in jail for one or more of his around 13 alleged crimes. It looks as though denialism has peaked and the Murdoch press, for one, is getting behind DeSantis. So, the GOP might need to be looking for new frauds and lies. Two years from now American public life might be so thoroughly debased that Trumpery might no longer need Trump.

Just

The general reaction after the election was one of relief, as though the fever had broken. But it might not herald a return to some sort of normalcy, not in the era of social misinformation. An angry Trump can be expected to sink to new depths as he seeks to regain control, and with the next Presidential cycle looming, the wooing of support in the primaries will be foremost in the minds of the contenders. Often it seems like a permanent concentration. GOP candidates will need to solicit support from the party base, which will likely still be the terrain of loonies and extremists. They'll be mad as hell because the evil paedophile Democrats are still in control. Just.