Seriously: Are we on the Road to Splitsville? Really? Because doesn’t the idea that one day the red states and the blue states will split up into separate countries seem…a bit far-fetched? Not to mention economically catastrophic, environmentally suicidal, culturally disastrous, and extraordinarily, Brexit-level dumb? Especially for the very states that grunt the most about splitting up?
After all, imagine what ingredients would be required to cook up this kind of a split. You’d need, first, a small, ruthless coterie of sharpies and Bond villains to conceive of such a thing for the purposes of expanding their own power and wealth. Then you’d need a concerted campaign to deceive a huge number of people into believing that it would benefit them. You’d need a network of either credulous or cynical operatives to conduct the campaign. Finally, you’d need a large population of nitwits, crackpots, and suckers to go for it.
Sounds improbable, doesn’t it? Although wait. Actually, no, it doesn’t. Now that you mention it, all those kinds of people, in every category, are in plentiful supply right here, in what Richard Nixon’s vice-president, the corrupt criminal Spiro T. Agnew, once referred to as “the greatest country in the nation.”
For the masterminds, we have the famous 1%—particularly the billionaire “tech-bros,” for whom having thousands of millions of dollars just isn’t enough, and who therefore fantasize about having their own country or completely ruining the current one. For their operatives and henchpersons, we have the Republican Party, its propaganda apparatus, and large swathe of the Christian church. And for the huddled masses yearning to breathe free (free of Democrats, liberals, science, knowledge, etc.)? Who do we have for that?
Feast your baby blues on this gif:
It was shot this past Monday at a “town hall” in Oaks, PA. The gentleman spazzing out in the foreground is you-know-who. As you may have heard, he was taking questions from the crowd, and providing, um, answers. Of a sort. Of what sort? Of this sort:
Question: My question is, what's your plan to help bring common sense back and help small businesses?
Trump: The fact is that, you know, they want to get away from gas, and I have friends, they're into the cooking world. I'm not. I just like to eat, but they're into the cooking. And I don't know how you feel. It sounds like you they feel that you really gas is much better than the electric for cooking, right? And they have this thing about, you know, they want to put gas out of business, right? No gas. You know, the amazing thing, we don't have electric in this country, but we have all the gas you can use. We have all the we have oil and gas. That's what we have. And even the cars, if you look, they want to go with all electric cars. California is having blackouts every week, bracket brownouts, blackouts, and then they come up with rules and regulation to go to all electric but they can't even supply what they have. It's so nuts. We're going to get number one, your utility course. You heard me said before, your course will be down, and we're getting rid of all the elect if you want electric rate and if you want gas, great. The only thing you can have is a hydrogen car, right? You heard me say that, right? Because you know what happens? They have a new car. They say it's great, but it's got one problem. You know what the problem is? Every once in a while, one will blow up. And if it does blow up, and you happen to be inside of it, you're in bad luck, because you're not recognizable. You know that it's the new thing, hydrogen. I said, No, thank you. I don't want to. I don't want…they call the wife. That's not my husband. Oh yes, it is.
Some time after the delivery of this monologue, someone in the audience fainted. Who could blame them? Then someone else fainted. And while these two blissfully unconscious people were being attended to, Donald Trump made the decision that he had answered enough questions. He called for music to be played, selections from his “playlist” which included a song by Celine Dion (despite her protests), Rufus Wainwright’s finicky version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” (in which he rejects Cohen’s rhyme set-up “do ya” and instead substitutes the tediously proper and unrhyming “do you”), and the Village People’s “YMCA” (which everyone except Trump and his enablers knows is an anthem in praise of gay cruising). This musical divertissement went on for 39 minutes, during which Trump “danced” as you see him in the above clip.
But never mind him. Look at those idiots in the background, clapping and grooving along as Grandpa does his funky-chicken thing to a geezer’s hit list (“Memory” from Cats, because of course. Pavarotti’s “Ave Maria” played not once, not twice, but thrice!) at what is supposed to be a town hall event about “the issues” three weeks before a Presidential election.
Those are the people who would vote for a split—good, decent, honest, God-fearing imbeciles whom Donald Trump has been playing, manipulating, deceiving, and conning since 2015. Trump natters and bullshits, babbles and lies, “moves” and “grooves,” and they stand up and cheer, providing that they haven’t first passed out and collapsed onto the floor.
“Yes, but come on, guys,” you may be thinking. “Are there enough of them to actually enable a Split-like split as depicted in The Split?”
We regret to inform, or remind, you that Donald Trump received around 74 million votes in 2020. That’s more (speaking of Brexit) than the entire population of the United Kingdom. After four years of Trump’s tenure in office—after the corruption, the grifting, the scandals, the impeachments, the 30,000 lies, the racism, the demagogy, the “Infrastructure Week” punch-line, the “replacement for Obamacare” being just, and forever, two weeks away, and the sheer criminal bumbling of Covid—after all those and other nightmares, 74 million Americans thought, “Yes. More of that, please.”
If Kamala Harris wins in three weeks, those 74 million (or their remnant) are going to be pissed off and looking to do something. They’ll make a big, fat plum ripe for the picking by the likes of Peter Thiel and Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk (three immigrants who delight in poisoning the blood of our nation) and their evangelical Christian allies. Like Jim Jones leading The Peoples Temple to Guyana, the masters of MAGA could very well be tempted to quit the US and go into geo-political business for themselves.
And will their followers follow? Are you kidding? These are people who will have voted for Donald Trump three times. You can sell them anything.
So forget what we said at the top, that a split might seem far-fetched. The more we think of it, the more it starts to seem inevitable.
I often fantasize about trump leading his worshipers to a compound in some obscure South American country and watch it deteriorate until there's only one way out...and his last recording will be about how original an idea it was.