There will be no vacation from Trump

Eternal vigilance is our duty

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There was a brief moment when many of us entertained the idea that once Trump was beaten and out of the White House, he wouldn’t be as large a part of our national story as he had been.  We thought we could move on to supporting Joe Biden’s agenda and the other important things our country needs.

As Trump’s ceaseless efforts to overturn the election prove, we can’t take a breather.  He knows how to get attention by saying and doing outrageous things, and even though he has been stripped of his Twitter megaphone, he’s going to continue to tell the big lie that he won in a landslide.

He has begun by focusing his attention on Nancy Pelosi.  He’s going to make sure she becomes the new Hillary Clinton.  He can’t tweet endlessly about her, but he can still hold rallies, and he will.  Listen for him to lead his adoring followers in new “lock her up” chants.  He knows exactly how to motivate his base:  by appealing to their bottomless well of bloodlust.

As astounding as this sounds, I believe he’s going to try to make heroes out of violent mob that attacked the Capitol.  He has given himself a head start with his tweet telling his base to “remember this day forever.”  He is going to turn the attack on the Capitol into the new “shot heard round the world.”  Some in his mob were already using “1776” as a rallying cry at the moment they broke the doors and windows and surged into the Capitol.

Trump has repeatedly riled up his base by telling them that they need to “take your country back.”  We need to seize this idea and turn it around on them by comparing our opposition to Trumpism with the aim of American revolutionaries to take this country from the British.  And we need to do this now, because it’s perfectly clear by the Republican base’s slavish dedication to Trump and his attempt to overturn the election that they don’t want to secede from the Union like the Confederate states did in 1860.  This time they want the whole enchilada.

Just because we took the White House, the senate and the house of representatives doesn’t mean that we’re going to get four years off from Trump and Trumpism.  He and the Republican Party he now owns need to get four years of flat-out war from us.  You can’t occupy the White House like it’s a fort and hope they go away.  You don’t erect walls around what you’ve won and stay on the defense.  You tear down the walls and go on the offense.

Joe Biden gave us a symbolic start when he took down the walls Trump put up around the White House and ordered a halt to construction on Trump’s wall at the southern border.  He signaled to the country and the world that his administration was open for business. 

But the Republican Party and its leader Donald Trump aren’t going to permit the ordinary business of government to go forward.  They’re going to attempt to obstruct everything Joe Biden wants to do. 

I say if we have to wage a political war to get COVID relief done, then let’s fight it.  If we have to wage a political war on hate, then let’s wage it.  If we have to wage a political war on racism, then let’s do it.

Trump is already making plans for more insurgent events similar to the march on the Michigan Capitol and occupation by armed militias. Well, Trump’s obedient fools can put on their camo and get their M-4’s and their AR-15’s and try to threaten Democratic administrations like they did last year in Michigan, but we can turn out voters and beat them the way we did in November in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, and yes, Michigan.  Showing off your camouflage outfits and brandishing your guns is symbology and theater.  Turning out voters is real power.

Trump thinks of January 6 as a dress rehearsal, but it wasn’t one for them, it was for us.  They went armed to the Capitol and tried to stop the certification of electoral college ballots in an effort to throw the election to Donald Trump.  More than 140 congressmen and senators lodged objections to the ballots and they did it on Trump’s orders.  But in the middle of the night, the people who represent us voted them down and certified Joe Biden as president and Kamala Harris as vice president.

Trump and the Republican Party want a war over what kind of country we will be, and they want to fight with chants of “lock her up” and the display of loaded weapons and cartoonishly camo-clad “soldiers” of the right. 

But as we showed on November 3, there are way more of us than there are of them, and we’ll win that war not with our fists or our rhetoric but with our numbers and our votes.