Rick Wilson, the sharpest of all the Never-Trumpers takes on the “protesters”:
Donald Trump fired the first shots in the COVID Civil War this week, a modern-day Jefferson Davis of the Pro-Plague States of America sending his opening salvo from Fort Twitter at Democratic governors who dared to question if it wasn’t just a wee bit early to end the stay-at-home orders in states still far to the left of the peak.
He started the week with claims of “total authority” and then cried about a supposed mutiny by mouthy state leaders. By Friday, he was up to calls to “liberate” states.
Who does he want people to rise up against, exactly: People who don’t want to die? People who don’t want protesters spreading a deadly disease that’s already killed 34,000 Americans? Governors who swore an oath to serve their states and protect their citizens? Science? Medicine?
Whatever the enemy, the Trump horde is lurching toward it with protests “breaking out” in state capitals across the land filled with MAGAmericans clad in their Red Badge of Credulity hats and carrying the banners of Esoteric Trumpism. Events in Florida, Kentucky, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, and California have popped up in the last 36 hours, with more on the way.
In Ohio, one striking photograph showed the screaming faces of Trump supporters pressed against the glass doors of the state capitol, their incandescent rage caught in a single moment of fury. Surrounding capitols, blaring horns, they’re ready to protest side by side, fighting social distancing to the death.
First of all, you should understand that none of this—zero, zip, nada —is organic. None of this is real. Every bit of it is being pushed on Trump’s behalf via the twin modalities of our doom: Fox and Facebook.
Just as the Tea Party had a brief, organic origin story but was soon managed, harnessed, controlled and weaponized, so too is today’s Trump movement. The crowds showing up for these “liberation rallies” are lowing cattle, led down a chute to be fed or slaughtered, depending on the day. Their ignorance of their own state as philosophical zombies whose lives Trump is literally willing to sacrifice for a tiny bump in the stock market is breathtaking. Dying for a second-order economic effect will show the libs, right?
It goes on…
What with the states being forced to get together in regional compacts to deal with the epidemic because the Trump administration is so incompetent along with the prospect of (what, border checkpoints?) between states if we want to keep these plague carriers from infecting the rest of us, I think we are seeing the American society’s fault lines start to open up — bigly.
Keep your fingers crossed that we get through the next six months without completely imploding. And let’s hope these little right-wing revolutionary cosplayers have their fun and then go back inside without killing too many people in the meantime.