Thursday, July 23, 2020

Double Zero

One more bad spin, and it could be the end, folks!
This plan may work—I’d go so far as to say it probably will work. But from Trump’s perspective, the way around the inevitable is to keep pushing and pushing and pushing against open doors until he’s subverted the election itself. This, too, may fail, and if it does, the basic obligations of government will practically require the Biden administration to throw open the books and do the oversight that wasn’t done in 2019 and 2020; to assure allies and adversaries alike that Trump didn’t permanently turn the United States into a mafia state. But if Trump’s efforts succeed, we will be in the dark and at Trump’s mercy, left to wonder what we might have learned and been spared from if Democrats had taken a different approach, and if it might have saved us from catastrophe. The plan Democrats have adopted is to put every egg that matters in a single basket and hope the most volatile and crooked president in American history doesn’t knock it over.