Chaotic Evil: The MAGA Playbook for November

Trump's campaign is failing. He knows he can't win without violence. That's why he's trying to incite violence. Beware.

America’s ninth inning begins now.

The election is seven weeks from today. Trump’s sentencing date is ten weeks out; the Congressional vote certification, sixteen. In 125 days, the next White House occupant will be inaugurated in Washington—either the first woman, or the last democratically elected, President of these United States.

The stakes could not be higher. The fate of the republic, of the world, of the planet itself, hinges on what happens in the next 49 days. That clock you hear ticking is wired to a MAGA detonator.

America’s ninth inning begins now. Happily, Kamala Harris, who came on late in relief of Joe Biden, is the Mariano Rivera of political candidates. On the other hand, Chief Justice John Roberts is the one calling balls and strikes.

As the late Yogi Berra once said, “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”

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I. Lay of the Land: A Survey of the Current Political Moment

Just as the first presidential debate effectively ended President Biden’s chances at re-election, so did the second debate end Trump’s. Yes, the polls still show a tight race. Yes, we must avoid complacency. Yes, we still have to act like Kamala Harris is five points down, et cetera. We know all that. But the only thing buoying the unraveling FPOTUS’s poll numbers, it says here, is the abject failure of the legacy media—the Times and WaPo and CNN— to tell people what’s really happening. And what’s really happening is this: Donald is done. He knows it, his family knows it, the Republicans know it, the big donors know it. The more we hear what Trump has to say, the less we like him. And by “we,” I mean the American people.

At the debate (somehow only one week ago), in front of the biggest audience that’s ever tuned in to watch him, under the brightest of bright lights, Donald melted like the creepy Nazi at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Which is appropriate, I suppose, as creepy Nazis are the only humans willing to work for Trump these days. We can quibble about the definition of “Nazi,” but Hitler led a political movement of fascist white nationalists. That’s what JD Vance is, and Stephen Miller, and Laura Loomer, the hateful 31-year-old chaos agent with whom the 78-year-old Republican nominee has been reportedly getting handsy. The reputable, competent, country-over-party conservatives who staffed his White House in 2017 left the camp long ago. Gone are the “Mad Dog” Mattises and the H.R. McMasters and the…I don’t know, the Rex Tillersons. I’m not even sure Bill Barr wants anything to do with FPOTUS at this point. Trump’s family has mostly abandoned him. It is the fascist weirdos, and only the fascist weirdos, who now have Donald’s (magically healed) ear.

Happily, fascist weirdos comprise a lunatic fringe in the United States. Ultra MAGA may be a populist movement, but it isn’t a popular one. Most Americans are not weirdos, most Americans are not fascists, and even fewer occupy the slender oval on the Venn diagram where the two overlap. How can the fascist weirdo candidate hope to secure enough support to compete in a national election, much less win one?

The answer is: by any means necessary. That includes the ceaseless dissemination of disinformation, fascist propaganda, racist and sexist and anti-Semitic memes, ugly rumors, baseless conspiracy theories, and egregious lies—all amplified by the Kremlin and its American useful idiots, by Fox News and Newsmax and Tucker Carlson and a thousand noxious podcasts, and by the vile Elon Musk on the social media site formerly known as Twitter. All of their “free speech” is intentional. Its purpose is to incite violence on Trump’s behalf, if not to foment a “Civil War” of the kind Tim Pool wouldn’t shut up about.

Fascist weirdos are ridiculous, and deserve to be relentlessly mocked. But fascist weirdos are also dangerous—too dangerous to be ignored.

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II. Stochastic Bombastic: The MAGA Method

To us—and by “us,” I mean anyone not steeped in the language of MAGA and the New Right—Trump’s recent statements about immigrants EATING THE PETS, public schools performing “brutal” surgery to change students’ gender during homeroom, Nancy Pelosi being responsible for J6, or Democrats pushing for post-birth abortions make him sound unhinged, if not outright mad. But everything he says has a darker purpose. Everything.

Donald is trying to foment acts of violence, full stop.

Trump’s amplification of the ugly lie about Springfield’s Haitian-American population—one his peckerhead running mate copped to cooking up—led directly to schools closing for fear of terror attacks, municipal buildings being evacuated because of bomb threats, and the cancellation of CultureFest, an annual event highlighting Springfield’s diversity. Pelosi’s husband was the victim of a violent assault. A healthy 28-year-old woman just died in Georgia as a direct result of the Trump abortion ban. Even his seemingly innocuous (and extremely ill-advised) post “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT” required the pop superstar to up the security around her. A planned terrorist attack at one of her recent concerts in Europe, remember, in which the plotter aimed to kill 10,000 Swifties, was thwarted at the last minute by the CIA. Now Donald’s militiamen know that the world’s most famous childless cat lady is on Trump’s enemies list.

But let us return to the “cats and dogs” lie: JD “created the story” about eating pets, Trump repeated it defiantly to the 67 million people watching the debate, and almost immediately, Haitian-Americans in Springfield, Ohio were under threat by MAGA fascists who had been “standing back and standing by.” Hell, the fucking Proud Boys even showed up

(That Vance chose Haitian immigrants to call out is telling. Haiti is where enslaved Black people rose up against their oppressors, overthrowing the white slaveholders and establishing their own government—the only time in recorded history a slave rebellion succeeded to that degree. Slavery was abolished in Haiti in 1804—more than six decades before the United States followed suit. That’s the stuff of white nationalist nightmares.)

Let me repeat this formula one more time, because it’s important to understand what these homegrown fascists are up to: A rumor designed to trigger outrage is manufactured by Donald or JD or one of their surrogates in the media, calling out a specific community or person or group of people. That rumor is broadcast via social media and amplified so that everyone and their grandmother hears about it. And MAGA militias, always on alert (“stand back and stand by”) for coded orders from their Führer, descend upon the place, looking to incite a riot and smash some skulls.

Chaya Raichik, the hateful [expletive deleted] who runs Libs of TikTok, engages in this sort of thing all the time, albeit on a much smaller scale, forever endangering the trans community. This is called stochastic terrorism: “political violence that has been instigated by hostile public rhetoric that is directed at a group or an individual.” And it’s what Trump and his allies want. Who was Chaya Raichik, after all, before she was platformed by Tucker Carlson and other fascists? Just some failed real estate agent with an IQ seemingly lower than the temperature on a lovely day in late September.

Over the weekend, for the second time in as many months, some MAGA lunatic tried to assassinate Donald Trump. Or, to be more accurate, some MAGA lunatic, armed with the kind of assault weapon Democrats and most Republican voters want banned, was detained by the Secret Service in the general vicinity of the course where FPOTUS was playing golf.

While their emotional effect on most Americans is negligible, these assassination attempts have high propaganda value. For one thing, MAGA has capitalized on that ridiculous photograph of Trump defiantly fist-pumping while Secret Service agents are draped on him. To them, this image makes Donald seem tough, unbreakable, and a beneficiary of divine intervention. JD Vance, Tucker Carlson, and other allies keep saying Trump was “shot in the face,” when what really happened is that he took some shrapnel to his ear and behaved like a tantruming little kid being dragged by his parents to the minivan. This hyperbolic language is explicitly intended to make us forget what we witnessed and recast Donald’s response to the rally shooting as something other than cowardly and selfish.

But that’s not all. The chaotic window of time between the initial act—the fired shots, in Pennsylvania; the Secret Service arresting the gunman, in Florida—and the moment when the media has pieced together what happened affords the bad guys a golden opportunity to spread disinformation. To wit: two false narratives boosted by the Kremlin in the immediate aftermath of the Pennsylvania rally shooting were once again making the rounds on Sunday, as Zarina Zabrisky astutely points out in her recent piece at the Byline Times: “‘Democrats are responsible’ and ‘Ukraine played a role.’” In both cases, the suspect turned out to be a MAGA. But before that was known, rumors circulated that the gunman was a Biden/Harris/Walz supporter. Some accounts went so far as to claim that President Biden himself was somehow behind the assassination attempt. Once a rumor like that is in the ether, it’s hard to dispel it.

“The method used to discredit the US current president and Democratic party used by the Kremlin officials is known as Rotten Herring,” Zabrisky explains. “It links a person or group to a false, scandalous accusation spread in the public information space. Repeated exposure forms a negative emotional response, and even after the statement is debunked, the negative association lingers, like a bad odour.” The Russians similarly, and falsely, linked Sunday’s suspect, Ryan Routh, with Ukraine. Zabrisky writes that Routh

expressed support for Ukraine and visited the country in 2022. He also had contacted Ukraine’s foreign legion several times, but was never part of the unit, according to a representative who described Routh’s messages as “delusional.”

In 2023, Routh used social media to encourage foreigners, including Afghan conscripts, to join the war, falsely presenting himself as a liaison for the Ukrainian government. Immediately, a Zealous Ukraine supporter tried to kill Trump with an AK-47 article appeared in Moskovsky Komsomolets, owned by Pavel Gusev, sanctioned by the UK and EU in 2022 for supporting Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine.

How many people who “do their own research” believe these Kremlin-amplified Rotten Herring lies?

To be clear: while I have doubts regarding the severity of Trump’s ear injury, I do not think either assassination attempt was staged. For my money, it does not beggar belief that two separate but equally crazy MAGAs tried and failed to take out FPOTUS.

With that said, it is possible to speak certain violent acts into existence. That’s how stochastic terrorism works: hostile words inspire hostile acts. Take a look at this unsettling sequence of events:

1. Starting in 2023, the notion of some wayward patriot making like John Wilkes Booth to Trump’s Abe Lincoln is amplified in certain rightwing media circles. As the researcher and journalist Jim Stewartson pointed out back in July, “Mike Flynn and his entire network have been pushing the idea of Trump being assassinated INCESSANTLY for nearly a year.” The odious likes of Alex Jones and Ivan Raiklin keep discussing the topic. And thus the idea of political assassination floats around the alt-right ether like a covid-infused Rudy Giuliani fart in a closed courtroom.

2. Some angry young white male MAGA lunatic loser, perhaps steeped in “Trump assassination” rhetoric coming from those rightwing channels, decides that he wants to be the hero of the story, makes an attempt on Donald’s life, and fails miserably.

3. The GOP and the Kremlin use the assassination attempt to push propaganda and disinformation about the gunman being a follower of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and how it’s them, not the MAGA, who are escalating violent rhetoric. (Donald said something to that effect just yesterday.) This “inflammatory language,” to use Trump’s phrasing, is intended to create an angry emotional response in the sort of screw-loose fanatic who decorates his house with TRUMP WON flags and details his pick-up with a picture of a bound and gagged Joe Biden.

4. Elon Musk quote-tweets a question posed by a dummy account called DogeDesigner—“Why they want to kill Donald Trump?”—below his own comment, “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” followed by a “thinking” emoji. The tweet garners tens of millions of views before he takes it down, claiming he was just joking.

Was this sequence of events coordinated? I have no idea, and ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Read through it again and ask yourself what violent act MAGA is trying to speak into existence here.

The Secret Service needs to protect Kamala at all costs.

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III. 11/5 as 1/6: The Trump Victory Blueprint

The original MAGA plan, back when Biden was the nominee and the election was still close, was either for Trump to win in the Electoral College, or else have a tie, in which case the GOP-controlled House would determine the winner. Democrats would sue, the case would go to the Supreme Court, and the three Trump judges would join with the three reactionary Leonard Leo weirdos to hand Donald the election.

But it ain’t gonna be close. Trump is headed for an epic Election Day ass-whooping. As things stand now, the only way he can win is to suppress voter turnout. This means, first, fucking with the postal service to disrupt mail-in ballots—which is already on his mind, given his recent statements on the subject and the fact that Louis DeJoy is somehow still postmaster general.

I also anticipate that, heading into November, the MAGA rhetoric will focus on the phantom problem of voter fraud—the cuckoo claim that Kamala Harris, the “border czar,” imported all these millions of illegals so they could fan out across the country and vote for her. The goal here is to draw out Proud Boys and others of their ilk to “defend” polling places from fraudulent voters, which would almost certainly result in violence of some kind. I also expect fake bomb threats called in on Election Day; anything they can devise to disrupt voting. What Trump wants is for Democrats to be too afraid to show up to vote; if that turns 11/5 into 1/6, so much the better.

And if none of that works, if his diapered ass is handed to him on Election Day in spite of all this MAGA-generated chaos, Trump will insist that the vote was rigged, that the election was stolen, that the polls show he won fair and square. He will claim that Kamala Harris staged a coup, and he won’t stop trying to incite another insurrection until Judge Merchan throws said diapered ass in the hoosegow.

Bottom line: Donald can’t win without violence. Donald gets off on violence. Donald’s worshipful followers know that violence makes Dear Leader happy. And Donald’s Supreme Court has made it easy for anyone in this country to acquire assault rifles and other weapons of war.

It doesn’t take much imagination to envision where this might be headed.

This is the threat, and it is real.

Fortunately, Joe Biden remains in the White House until January 20, 2025. In granting Trump full immunity for official acts, SCOTUS has also granted him full immunity for official acts. So far, the President has not taken advantage of these powers. To safeguard the election, the certification of the vote, and the peaceful transfer of power, he may well have to do so. The only way to defeat chaotic evil is with lawful good.

America’s ninth inning begins now.

Batter up.

CORRECTION: Removed clause about Nate Silver’s financial association with Peter Thiel potentially providing Trump will poll fodder.

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Photo: A certain short-fingered fist.