The coming Republican freakout

My friend Michael Elkon introduced me a few years ago to the concept of a “banked win,” which I discussed in A FAN’S LIFE:

A banked win happens when as a psychological matter fans treat a game as already won, even though the contest isn’t actually over.  This of course creates the possibility of the most painful of all losses: the revocation of a win that, for psychological purposes, has already been banked.  Elkon is an Atlanta Falcons fan, so he offers up the example of Atlanta leading New England by 28-3 in the Super Bowl.  Atlanta fans were understandably, but oh so recklessly, already celebrating that championship, only to see it snatched away in what was for them a kind of slow-motion nightmare.

I’m thinking right now about the psychological state of Trump Land, which in a matter of two days has gone from hubristic triumphalism to overwhelming panic and fear.

Just last week, their Anointed Savior had, after miraculously dodging a literal bullet, appeared before them to claim his long-ordained nomination to the presidency, which at the moment he seemed overwhelmingly likely to recapture. His opponents were demoralized and desperate; his fortunes were ascending by the hour; the sweet ambrosia of ultimate victory seemed almost close enough to taste.

And then everything went very, very wrong.

I don’t think it’s possible to overestimate the complete mental breakdown that the right wing in this country is going to undergo over the course of the next three and a half months if, as seems quite possible at the moment, the prospect of Trump being defeated, perhaps even in a resounding fashion, by of all people a Black woman, begins to look more and more likely.

This would be an almost unendurably horrible event for the right in this country under any circumstances. But these are not any circumstances. They are the specific circumstances in which a banked win is taken from these people, in a kind of slow-motion three-month nightmare. as their lord and savior is humiliated — as they themselves are humiliated — by a candidate who is the literal embodiment of everything they most hate and fear.

What we could well be headed for is a nationwide crack up of an entire political movement, and the tens of millions of people who support it, triggering all kinds of irrational conspiracism, and potential stochastic violence.

Another thing that’s likely to get triggered is an all-out pseudo-legal assault, as the Republicans try desperately to cash in on having appointed so many reactionary hacks to the federal judiciary.

I see two routes in particular by which the latter may end up being manifested.

First, the GOP may try to find another Aileen Cannon or Matthew Kacsmaryk — hell, given that these people aren’t noted for their subtlety, they will probably just move heaven and earth to get their case in front of one of those two judges — to hear a challenge to the utterly preposterous idea that Joe Biden doesn’t actually have the right to choose not to be the Democratic candidate for president. But doesn’t that sound completely insane you might ask?

Yet since when has that been a barrier to the new breed of right wing judges, nurtured over the last generation like so many Alien egg pods in the Federalist Society hatcheries? Election law expert James Gardner:

If the Republican Party sues to block Biden from stepping down in certain states, does it have a case?

The Republicans have a track history here, and the track history is filing endless, frivolous, losing litigation. And that is the pattern they’re threatening to replicate.

Filing these lawsuits may be just for talking points. But it also may be that Republicans have been playing a very long game here, and that game involves essentially capturing the federal judiciary. I think maybe they’re hoping they’ll get lucky and get a judge they handpicked who will ignore the law.

We’re roughly a hundred days from the election. Is that a short enough time frame for Republicans to file a lawsuit, get lucky with a judge, and withstand an appeal?

I suppose it could be. I mean, there are examples we already have. The dismissal of the documents suit against Trump is an example of a handpicked Trump appointee doing what she was appointed to do. And if this reaches the Supreme Court, honestly, all bets are off. That is a court that is not impartial, not independent. But I think even the Supreme Court as it’s currently constituted might balk.

I always think it’s important in talking about stuff like this to keep the big picture in mind, which is that the Trump wing of the Republican Party has basically abandoned its commitment to democracy. And so whatever tools it can pick up to beat the system into submission are tools it will deploy.

The fact that such a lawsuit would have zero basis in any recognized source of law is not going to stop these people, because it never does. It probably won’t get anywhere, but it does have a real chance of generating a classic bogus right wing “controversy,” that might peel off some voters here and there, who read a post on Facebook from their aunt’s best friend’s college roommate, that Kamala Harris doesn’t even have the right to be on the ballot.

Speaking of which, the second line of attack, that is already being vomited up by the scream machine, is disbarred lawyer John Eastman’s 2020 Greatest Hit, Stairway to Birtherism, in which he argues that “some” people are saying that Harris isn’t a natural born citizen, because when she was born in Oakland in 1964 it’s possible that her parents were on temporary visas rather than being lawful permanent residents, and if you squint at the Constitution in just the right way . . . I’m not even going to bother with the details of this nonsense, except to remind everybody that this stuff is always out there, and it can’t be bargained with, or reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop… ever, until America is back in the hands of its rightful owners, which most emphatically do not include anyone even remotely like Kamala Harris.

Fasten your seatbelts; it’s going to be a bumpy fall.