We get a lot of email, most of it is wonderful. And there is a group that we chat with regularly. We have noted to them several times that we go back and forth on how serious Trump might be on this whole thing.

If a man was plotting a coup, some kind of real hostile takeover – like gamesmanship at the Electoral College and reliance on a House win and SCOTUS blessing, a move so bold it would require the military to put down the inevitable protests, that man would be claiming fraud at every turn, pressuring politicians and regular citizens, while also ensuring that he has 100% control of the military. Donald Trump is doing exactly ALL of the above. We all heard reports about Trump “decapitating” the top leaders at the Pentagon (as a lame-duck! Less than 90 days people are taking these jobs!) and installing loyalists.

We also hear reports from people inside the White House that say that Trump is just slowly accepting this and inevitably, he will claim that he certainly won but they’ll never be given a chance to “really prove it” and then slink off to Florida to immediately begin campaigning again for 2024, mostly to simply collect money from rubes donating to a “campaign fund.”

Then we hear reports like this from Business Insider:

Rep. Adam Smith, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement on Tuesday that the “gutting” of the department ought to “alarm” Americans.

“It is hard to overstate just how dangerous high-level turnover at the Department of Defense is during a period of presidential transition,” he said. “The top policy professional in the Department resigning the day after the Secretary of Defense was fired could mark the beginning of a process of gutting the DoD — something that should alarm all Americans.”

This coming from a man who knows the assignments that come under each of these positions and knows the individuals fired and knows the individuals appointed. He knows what both groups believe. In other words, someone who knows the situation as well as anyone.

Smith added that “if this is the beginning of a trend — the President either firing or forcing out national security professionals in order to replace them with people perceived as more loyal to him — then the next 70 days will be precarious at best and downright dangerous at worst.”

Stories like these obviously throw us straight into the “Oh shit!” category.

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Peace, y’all
Jason
[email protected] and on Twitter @JasonMiciak