Corrosive

I still don't expect Mafia Mulligan to be successful in his coup attempt, as John Scalzi reassured today (short of bringing tanks out into the streets, which will not happen... supposedly, since the military will not let it).

But as Dave Roberts from Vox said today on Twitter, that's not the only thing that matters:

What Trump is establishing right now is a new norm for the conservative movement, whereby "fighting for you" means disrupting the electoral process at every opportunity and rejecting results conservatives don't like. Even if he fails in this attempt, the norm will stand.

From now on, every conservative that loses an election and doesn't try to fuck up or defy the voting process will be labeled a cuck or a RINO. There's just no way to overstate how toxic this is in a democracy, far beyond the question of Trump himself.

Two things about this half-ass coup attempt, in response to lots of comments I'm seeing. First, the fact that it's likely to fail this year is NOT reason to ignore it or treat it blithely. It's establishing precedent, gearing the entire movement up for the next attempt.

Second, Trump and his cronies (or future aspiring authoritarians) being incompetent morons is in no way incompatible with authoritarianism succeeding. As the last 4 years should have made clear, destroying and degrading things requires no particular intelligence or sophistication.

Roberts is not the only one to say something like this (I know I've read similar things from several other people), but he's the one I saw today in the midst of the most recent coup de don action, when the national GOP put out a statement backing up the coup and my own state's GOP leader alluded to deep (nonexistent) problems with Minnesota's election. Every day brings a new level of outrage and it's getting to me.