Inauguration Day passed by largely without incident, with 25,000 National Guardsmen insuring that Donald Trump’s own militia was sufficiently cowed into submission. Trump snuck out of town, not even taking a moment to partake in the optics of military force which normally would excite him, since it wasn’t the “radical left” for whom their presence was deemed necessary. Trump departed with the “promise” that he will be “back” in “some form,” which brings to mind the 1957 film A Face In the Crowd, in which Andy Griffith—in a rare dramatic role—played a drunken vagrant named Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, who conned a radio journalist with his “folksy” guitar playing, charm and “populist” ringers, providing him with first a local and then a national platform with his own TV show.
The uneducated but garrulous Rhodes was soon elevated into a successful pitchman both in business and for a presidential candidate. But then he revealed his true self behind the cameras, an arrogant egomaniac contemptuous of “little” people, and after a hot mike caught him heaping abuse on both the candidate and his own audience, all of Rhodes upper-crust “friends” deserted him. But Walter Matthau’s staff writer Mel assured Rhodes that while he may be out of a job at the moment, he would be back on the air soon enough—albeit with much less “prestige”—because there would always be a gullible audience for a populist conman like him.
Like Rhodes, Trump leaves town disgraced, and the failure of even the most fanatical Trumpists to turn out in force as “promised” elsewhere in the country suggests that now that he is out of power, he has lost some of his “credibility”; his audience called it a day, at least for now. But Trumpism itself will never “die,” because the reality is that it is just the latest name for other far-right, white nationalist “movements” we have seen in the past, like the so-called “Tea Party” movement. There was a difference in this latest iteration, of course; this time there was a morally-corrupt president who was leading the movement, and giving “legitimacy” to violent action.
In the meantime, President Joe Biden has his work cut out for him, particularly in matters of the pandemic, the environment, immigration, repairing relations with international allies, tackling the Russian cyber threat, and seeing a new stimulus package through. He wasn’t helped by the Republican-controlled Senate, which refused to confirm any of his cabinet nominees with the excuse of allowing Trump’s election fraud scam run its course, even though it was obvious to everyone with a pea for a brain that it was morally and ethically—as well as lawfully—a dead duck, with the events of January 6 its natural endgame. Biden is also potentially hamstrung by the fact that Trump loyalists were shoe-horned into civil service positions in the last days in order to obstruct his policy positions, and the failure of Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell to reach a power-sharing agreement to prevent Republicans from obstructing Biden’s policy agenda in his first 100 days.
It would be in the Republican Party’s interest not to immediately incite partisan divisiveness if it wishes to expel the influence of Trumpism/fascism. One suspects that at least a modest number of Republicans in the Senate do not want to set-up immediate roadblocks for Biden, since it would only embolden the remaining Trumpists who feed off of division, anarchy and racism. Of course there is still Fox News, which has done some “shaking up,” expelling the editors who angered Trumpists by calling Arizona for Biden “too early,” and placing partisan voices in new time slots to regain the extremist white nationalist audience it lost to Newsmax and OAN.
Tucker Carlson is already busy with the Trumpist propaganda line that Biden is going to “war” with “half of America,” as if Trump wasn’t explicitly doing that very thing in actual fact—as had been Carlson and the rest of the Fox News fascist propaganda machine in going to “war” with 81 million American voters who they wished to silence. Laura Ingraham and Lou Dobbs are, of course, back to their favorite pastimes—inciting racism and paranoia, warning of the “cultural threat” to the nation allegedly posed by people with brown skin.
As for Trump, he has an impeachment trial to look forward to, a tax fraud case in New York, a defamation case brought by two women who claim he sexually-assaulted them, and potentially a civil lawsuit for his part in inciting the sacking of the Capitol Building. While Post Master General Louis DeJoy is happy to slither off into obscurity—surprisingly not the target of Trumpists for “aiding and abetting” mail-in ballot “fraud”—for Trump’s other familiars, like Stephen Miller, Mark Meadows, Peter Navarro, Jared Kushner, Mike Pompeo, John Ratcliffe and many others, there may be Congressional hearings and Justice Department investigations in their futures; given the fact that some of them are considered too “toxic” for immediate employment, they probably don’t have anything better to do with their time anyways.
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